What's wrong with the world

If

WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE WORLD

WHAT'S WRONG
WITH THE WORLD

BY

GILBERT K. CHESTERTON

AUTHOR OF " VARIED TYPES," "CHARLES DICKENS,"
" TKEMENDOCS TRIFLES." ETC.

NEW YORK

DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY
1910

COPYRIGHT, 1910, BT
DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY

Published, October, 1910

DEDICATION

To C. F. G. MASTERMAN, M. P.
MY DEAR CHARLES,

I originally called this book "What is
Wrong," and it would have satisfied your sar-
donic temper to note the number of social mis-
understandings that arose from the use of the
title. Many a mild lady visitor opened her
eyes when I remarked casually, " I have been
doing *What is Wrong' all this morning."
And one minister of religion moved quite sharply
in his chair when I told him (as he understood
it) that I had to run upstairs and do what was
wrong, but should be down again in a minute.
Exactly of what occult vice they silently accused
me I cannot conjecture, but I know of what I
accuse myself ; and that is, of having written a
very shapeless and inadequate book, and one
quite unworthy to be dedicated to you. TAs far

DEDICATION

as literature goes, this book is what is wrong,
and no mistake.

It may seem a refinement of insolence to
present so wild a composition to one who has
recorded two or three of the really impressive
visions of the moving millions of England.
You are the only man alive who can make the
map of England crawl with life; a most
creepy and enviable, accomplishment. Why then
should I trouble you with a book which, even if
it achieves its object (which is monstrously un-
likely) can only be a thundering gallop of
theory?

Well, I do it partly because I think you poli-
ticians are none the worse for a few inconvenient
ideals ; but more because you will recognise the
many arguments we have had ; those arguments
which the most wonderful ladies in the world
can never endure for very long. And, perhaps,
you will agree with me that the thread of com-
radeship and conversation must be protected be-
cause it is so frivolous. It must be held sacred,
it must not be snapped, because it is not worth
tying together again. It is exactly because argu-

DEDICATION

ment is idle that men (I mean males) must take
it seriously; for when (we feel), until the crack
of doom, shall we have so delightful a difference
again? But most of all I offer it to you be-
cause there exists not only comradeship, but
a very different thing, called friendship; an
agreement under all the arguments and a thread
which, please God, will never break.
Yours always,

G. K. CHESTERTON.

CONTENTS

PART I
THE HOMELESSNESS OF MAN

CHAPTER PAQK

I THE MEDICAL MISTAKE .... 1

II WANTED: AN UNPRACTICAL MAN . 8

III THE NEW HYPOCRITE .... 18

IV THE FEAR OF THE PAST .... 29
V THE UNFINISHED TEMPLE ... 44

VI THE ENEMIES OF PROPERTY . . ,. 54

VII THE FREE FAMILY 61

VIII THE WILDNESS OF DOMESTICITY . 69

IX HISTORY OF HUDGE AND GUDGE . 77

X OPPRESSION BY OPTIMISM ... 86

XI THE HOMELESSNESS OF JONES . . 91

PART II

IMPERIALISM, OR THE MISTAKE ABOUT MAN

I THE CHARM OF JINGOISM . . . 101

II WISDOM AND THE WEATHER . . . 108

III THE COMMON VISION 119

IV THE INSANE NECESSITY 126

CONTENTS

PART III
.FEMINISM, OR THE MISTAKE ABOUT WOMAN

CHAPTER PAGE

I THE UNMILITARY SUFFRAGETTE . . 141

II THE UNIVERSAL STICK .... 146

III THE EMANCIPATION OF DOMESTICITY 157

IV THE ROMANCE OF THRIFT . . . 168
V THE COLDNESS OF CHLOE . . . 178

VI THE PEDANT AND SAVAGE . . . 186

VII THE MODERN SURRENDER OF WOMAN 192

VIII THE BRAND OF THE FLEUR-DE-LIS . 198

IX SINCERITY AND THE GALLOWS . . 204

X THE HIGHER ANARCHY .... 209

XI THE QUEEN AND THE SUFFRAGETTES 217

XII THE MODERN SLAVE 220

PART IV

EDUCATION, oa THE MISTAKE ABOUT THE CHILD

I THE CALVINISM OF TO-DAY . . . 229

II THE TRIBAL TERROR 234

III THE TRICKS OF ENVIRONMENT . . 239

IV THE TRUTH ABOUT EDUCATION . . 242
V. AN EVIL CRY ....... 247

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

VI AUTHORITY THE UNAVOIDABLE . . 252

VII THE HUMILITY OF MRS. GRUNDY . 260

VIII THE BROKEN RAINBOW .... 268

IX THE NEED FOR NARROWNESS . . 275

X THE CASE FOR THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS 280

XI THE SCHOOL FOR HYPOCRITES . . 2Q1

XII THE STALENESS OF THE NEW SCHOOLS 301

XIII THE OUTLAWED PARENT .... 308

XIV FOLLY AND FEMALE EDUCATION .., . 314

PART V
THE HOME OF THE MAN

I THE EMPIRE OF THE INSECT . . 323
II THE FALLACY OF THE UMBRELLA

STAND. . . ...... 335

III THE DREADFUL DUTY OF GUDGE . 343

IV A LAST INSTANCE 348

V CONCLUSION 350

THREE NOTES

I ON FEMALE SUFFRAGE . . . ... 861

II ON CLEANLINESS IN EDUCATION . 364

III ON PEASANT PROPRIETORSHIP . 366

WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE WORLD

PART I
THE HOMELESSNESS OE MAN

THE MEDICAL MISTAKE

A BOOK of modern social inquiry has a shape
that is somewhat sharply defined. It begins as
a rule with an analysis, with statistics, tables
of population, decrease of crime among Con-
gregationalists, growth of hysteria among
policemen, and similar ascertained facts; it
ends with a chapter that is generally called
"The Remedy." It is almost wholly due to
this careful, solid, and scientific method that
"The Remedy" is never found. For this
scheme of medical question and answer is a
blunder; the first great blunder of sociology.
It is always called stating the disease before
we find the cure. But it is the whole definition
and dignity of man that in social matters we
must actually find the cure before we find the
disease.

The fallacy is one of the fifty fallacies that
I

THE MEDICAL MISTAKE

come from the modern madness for biological
or bodily metaphors. It is convenient to speak
of the Social Organism, just as it is convenient
to speak of the British Lion. But Britain is
no more an organism than Britain is a lion.
The moment we begin to give a nation the
unity and simplicity of an animal, we begin
to think wildly. Because every man is a biped,
fifty men are not a centipede. This has pro-
duced, for instance, the gaping absurdity of
perpetually talking about " young nations "
and " dying nations," as if a nation had a fixed
and physical span of life. Thus people will
say that Spain has entered a final senility;
they might as well say that Spain is losing all
her teeth. Or people will say that Canada
should soon produce a literature; which is like
saying that Canada must soon grow a mustache.
Nations consist of people; the first generation
may be decrepit, or the ten thousandth
may be vigorous. Similar applications of the
fallacy are made by those who see in the in-
creasing size of national possessions, a simple

THE MEDICAL MISTAKE

increase in wisdom and stature, and in favor
with God and man. These people, indeed, even
fall short in sub'tlety of the parallel of a hu-
man body. They do not even ask whether an
empire is growing taller in its youth, or only
growing fatter in its old age. But of all the
instances of error arising from this physical
fancy, the worst is that we have before us : the
habit of exhaustively describing a social sick-
ness, and then propounding a social drug.

Now we do talk first about the disease in
cases of bodily breakdown; and that for an
excellent reason. Because, though there may
be doubt about the way in which the body broke
down, there is no doubt at all about the shape
in which it should be built up again. No doc-
tor proposes to produce a new kind of man,
with a new arrangement of eyes or limbs. The
hospital, by necessity, may send a man home
with one leg less : but it will not (in a creative
rapture) send him home with one leg extra.
Medical science is content with the normal
human body, and only seeks to restore it.
3

THE MEDICAL MISTAKE

But social science is by no means always
content with the normal human soul; it has all
sorts of fancy souls for sale. Man as a social
idealist will say " I am tired of being a Puritan ;
I want to be a Pagan," or " Beyond this dark
probation of Individualism I see the shining
paradise of Collectivism." Now in bodily ills
there is none of this difference about the ulti-
mate ideal. The patient may or may not want
quinine; but he certainly wants health. No
one says " I am tired of this headache ; I want
some toothache," or "The only thing for this
Russian influenza is a few German measles,"
or "Through this dark probation of catarrh
I see the shining paradise of rheumatism." But
exactly the whole difficulty in our public prob-
lems is that some men are aiming at cures which
other men would regard as worse maladies ; are
offering ultimate conditions as states of health
which others would uncompromisingly call
states of disease. Mr. Belloc once said that he
would no more part with the idea of property
than with his teeth; yet to Mr. Bernard Shaw
I

THE MEDICAL MISTAKE

property is not a tooth, but a toothache.
Lord Milner has sincerely attempted to intro-
duce German efficiency ; and many of us would
as soon welcome German measles. Dr. Saleeby
would honestly like to have Eugenics; but I
would rather have rheumatics.

This is the arresting and dominant fact about
modern social discussion ; that the quarrel is not
merely about the difficulties, but about the aim.
We agree about the evil; it is about the good
that we should tear each other's eyes out. We
all admit that a lazy aristocracy is a bad
thing. We should not by any means all admit
than an active aristocracy would be a good
thing. We all feel angry with an irreligious
priesthood ; but some of us would go mad with
disgust at a really religious one. Everyone is
indignant if our army is weak, including the
people who would be even more indignant if it
were strong. The social case is exactly the
opposite of the medical case. We do not dis-
agree, like doctors', about the precise nature of
the illness, while agreeing about the nature of
5

THE MEDICAL MISTAKE

health. On the contrary, we all agree that
England is unhealthy, but half of us would not
look at her in what the other half would call
blooming health. Public abuses are so promi-
nent and pestilent that they sweep all generous
people into a sort of fictitious unanimity. We
forget that, while we agree about the abuses
of things, we should differ very much about the
uses of them. Mr. Cadbury and I would agree
about the bad public-house. It would be pre-
cisely in front of the good public-house that
our painful personal fracas would occur.

I maintain, therefore, that the common socio-
logical method is quite useless : that of first dis-
secting abject poverty or cataloguing prosti-
tution. We all dislike abject poverty; but it
might be another business if we began to dis-
cuss independent and dignified poverty. We
all disapprove of prostitution; but we do not
all approve of purity. The only way to dis-
cuss the social evil is to get at once to the social
ideal. We can all see the national madness;

6

THE MEDICAL MISTAKE

but what is national sanity? I have called
this book "What Is Wrong with the World?"
and the upshot of the title can be easily and
clearly stated. What is wrong is that we do
not ask what is right.

IT
WANTED, AN UNPRACTICAL MAN

THERE is a popular philosophical joke intended
to typify the endless and useless arguments
of philosophers ; I mean the joke about which
came first, the chicken or the egg? I am not
sure that properly understood, it is so futile an
inquiry after all. I am not concerned here to
enter on those deep metaphysical and theolog-
ical differences of which the chicken and egg
debate is a frivolous, but a very felicitous, type.
The evolutionary materialists are appropri-
ately enough represented in the vision of all
things coming from an egg, a dim and mon-
strous oval germ that had laid itself by acci-
dent. That other supernatural school of
thought (to which I personally adhere) would
be not unworthily typified in the fancy that
this round world of ours is but an egg brooded
upon by a sacred unbegotten bird ; the mystic
8

AN UNPRACTICAL MAN

dove of the prophets. But it is to much hum-
bler functions that I here call the awful power
of such a distinction. Whether or no the liv-
ing bird is at the beginning of our mental chain,
it is absolutely necessary that it should be at
the end of our mental chain. The bird is the
thing to be aimed at — not with a gun, but a
life-bestowing wand. What is essential to our
right thinking is this : that the egg and the
bird must not be thought of as equal cosmic
occurrences recurring alternatively forever.
They must not become a mere egg and bird
pattern, like the egg and dart pattern. One
is a means and the other an end; they are in
different mental worlds. Leaving the compli-
cations of the human breakfast-table out of ac-
count, in an elemental sense, the egg only ex-
ists to produce the chicken. But the chicken
does not exist only in order to produce another
egg. He may also exist to amuse himself, to
praise God, and even to suggest ideas to a
French dramatist. Being a conscious life, he is,
or may be, valuable in himself. Now our modern
9

AN UNPRACTICAL MAN

politics are full of a noisy forgetfulness ; for-
gctfulness that the production of this happy
and conscious life is after all the aim of all
complexities and compromises. We talk of
nothing but useful men and working institu-
tions ; that is, we only think of the chickens as
things that will lay more eggs. Instead of
seeking to breed our ideal bird, the eagle of
Zeus or the Swan of Avon, or whatever we hap-
pen to want, we talk entirely in terms of the
process and the embryo. The process itself,
divorced from its divine object, becomes doubt-
ful and even morbid ; poison enters the embryo
of everything; and our politics are rotten eggs.
Idealism is only considering everything in its
practical essence. Idealism only means that
we should consider a poker in reference to pok-
ing before we discuss its suitability for wife-
beating; that we should ask if an egg is good
enough for practical poultry-rearing before
we decide that the egg is bad enough for prac-
tical politics. But I know that this primary
pursuit of the theory (which is but pursuit of
10

AN UNPRACTICAL MAN

the aim) exposes one to the cheap charge of
fiddling while Rome is burning. A school, of
which Lord Rosebery is representative, has
endeavored to substitute for the moral or social
ideals which have hitherto been the motives of
politics a general coherency or completeness
in the social system which has gained the nick-
name of " efficiency." I am not very certain
of the secret doctrine of this sect In the mat-
ter. But, as far as I can make out, " effi-
ciency " means that we ought to discover every-
thing about a machine except what it is for.
There has arisen in our time a most singular
fancy: the fancy that when things go very
wrong we need a practical man. It would be
far truer to say, that when things go very
wrong we need an unpractical man. Certainly,
at least, we need a theorist. A practical man
means a man accustomed to mere daily prac-
tice, to the way things commonly work. When
things will not work, you must have the thinker,
the man who has some doctrine about why they
work at all. It is wrong to fiddle while Rome
11

AN UNPRACTICAL MAN

is burning; but it is quite right to study the
theory of hydraulics while Rome is burning.

It is then necessary to drop one's daily ag-
nosticism and attempt rerum cognoscere causas.
If your aeroplane has a slight indisposition, a
handy man may mend it. But, if it is seri-
ously ill, it is all the more likely that some
absent-minded old professor with wild white
hair will have to be dragged out of a college
or a laboratory to analyze the evil. The more
complicated the smash, the whiter-haired and
more absent-minded will be the theorist who is
needed to deal with it; and in some extreme
cases, no one but the man (probably insane)
who invented your flying-ship could possibly
say what was the matter with it.

" Efficiency," of course, is futile for the same
reason that strong men, will-power and the
superman are futile. That is, it is futile be-
cause it only deals with actions after they
have been performed. It has no philosophy
for incidents before they happen ; therefore it
has no power of choice. An act can only be

AN UNPRACTICAL MAN

successful or unsuccessful when it is over; if
it is to begin, it must be, in the abstract, right
or wrong. There is no such thing as backing
a winner ; for he cannot be a winner when he is
backed. There is no such thing as fighting on
the winning side; one fights to find out which
is the winning side. If any operation has oc-
curred, that operation was efficient. If a man
is murdered, the murder was efficient. A trop-
ical sun is as efficient in making people lazy as
a Lancashire foreman bully in making them
energetic. Maeterlinck is as efficient in filling
a man with strange spiritual tremors as Messrs.
Crosse and Blackwell are in filling a man with
jam. But it all depends on what you want to
be filled with. Lord Rosebery, being a modern
skeptic, probably prefers the spiritual tremors.
I, being -an orthodox Christian, prefer the jam.
But both are efficient when they have been ef-
fected; and inefficient until they are effected.
A man who thinks much about success must be
the drowsiest sentimentalist; for he must be
always looking back. If he only likes victory
IS

AN UNPRACTICAL MAN

he must always come late for the battle. For
the man of action there is nothing but idealism.
This definite ideal is a far more urgent and
practical matter in our existing English trou-
ble than any immediate plans or proposals.
For the present chaos is due to a sort of gen-
eral oblivion of all that men were originally
aiming at. No man demands what he desires ;
each man demands what he fancies he can get.
Soon people forget what the man really wanted
first ; and after a successful and vigorous polit-
ical life, he forgets it himself. The whole is
an extravagant riot of second bests, a pande-
monium of pis-aller. Now this sort of pliabil-
ity does not merely prevent any heroic con-
sistency; it also prevents any really practical
compromise. One can only find the middle dis-
tance between two points if the two points will
stand still. We may make an arrangement be-
tween two litigants who cannot both get what
they want; but not if they will not even tell
us what they want. The keeper of a restau-
rant would much prefer that each customer

AN UNPRACTICAL MAN

should give his order smartly, though it were
for stewed ibis or boiled elephant, rather than
that each customer should sit holding his head
in his hands, plunged in arithmetical calcula-
tions about how much food there can be on the
premises. Most of us have suffered from a
certain sort of ladies who, by their perverse un-
selfishness, give more trouble than the selfish;
who almost clamor for the unpopular dish and
scramble for the worst seat. Most of us have
known parties or expeditions full of this seeth-
ing fuss of self-effacement. From much
meaner motives than those of such admirable
women, our practical politicians keep things
in the same confusion through the same doubt
about their real demands. There is nothing
that so much prevents a settlement as a tangle
of small surrenders. We are bewildered on
every side by politicians who are in favor of
secular education, but think it hopeless to
•work for it; who desire total prohibition, but
are certain they should not demand it; who
regret compulsory education, but resignedly
15

AN UNPRACTICAL MAN

continue it; or who want peasant proprietor-
ship and therefore vote for something else.
It is this dazed and floundering opportunism
that gets in the way of everything. If our
statesmen were visionaries something practical
might be done. If we asked for something in
the abstract we might get something in the
concrete. As it is, it is not only impossible
to get what one wants, but it is impossible to
get any part of it, because nobody can mark it
out plainly like a map. That clear and even
hard quality that there was in the old bargain-
ing has wholly vanished. We forget that the
word " compromise " contains, among other
things, the rigid and ringing word "promise."
Moderation is not vague; it is as definite as
perfection. The middle point is as fixed as
the extreme point.

If I am made to walk the plank by a pirate,
it is vain for me to offer, as a common-sense
compromise, to walk along the plank for a
reasonable distance. It is exactly about the
reasonable distance that the pirate and I differ.
16

AN UNPRACTICAL MAN

There is an exquisite mathematical split second
at which the plank tips up. My common-sense
ends just before that instant; the pirate's
common-sense begins just beyond it. But the
point itself is as hard as any geometrical dia-
gram; as abstract as any theological dogma.

17

m

THE NEW HYPOCRITE

BUT this new cloudy political cowardice has
rendered useless the old English compromise.
People have begun to be terrified of an improve-
ment merely because it is complete. They call
it Utopian and revolutionary that anyone
should really have his own way, or anything be
really done, and done with. Compromise used
to mean that half a loaf was better than no
bread. Among modern statesmen it really
seems to mean that half a loaf is better than
a whole loaf.

As an instance to sharpen the argument, I
take the one case of our everlasting education
bills. We have actually contrived to invent a
new kind of hypocrite. The old hypocrite,
Tartuffe or Pecksniff, was a man whose aims
were really worldly and practical, while he pre-
tended that they were religious. The new
18

THE NEW HYPOCRITE

hypocrite is one whose aims are really reli-
gious, while he pretends that they are wordly
and practical. The Rev. Brown, the Wes-
leyan minister, sturdily declares that he cares
nothing for creeds, but only for education ;
meanwhile, in truth, the wildest Wesleyanism
is tearing his soul. The Rev. Smith, of
the Church of England, explains gracefully,
with the Oxford manner, that the only question
for him is the prosperity and efficiency of the
schools ; while in truth all the evil passions of a
curate are roaring within him. It is a fight
of creeds masquerading as policies. I think
these reverend gentlemen do themselves wrong;
I think they are more pious than they will ad-
mit. Theology is not (as some suppose) ex-
punged as an error. It is merely concealed,
like a sin. Dr. Clifford really wants a theo-
logical atmosphere as much as Lord Halifax;
only it is a different one. If Dr. Clifford
would ask plainly for Puritanism and Lord
Halifax ask plainly for Catholicism, something
might be done for them. We are all, one
19

THE NEW HYPOCRITE

hopes, imaginative enough to recogtaize the
dignity and distinctness of another religion,
like Islam or the cult of Apollo. I am quite
ready to respect another man's faith ; but it is
too much to ask that I should respect his doubt,
his worldly hesitations and fictions, his political
bargain and make-believe. Most Nonconform-
ists with an instinct for English history could
see something poetic and national about the
Archbishop of Canterbury as an Archbishop
of Canterbury. It is when he does the rational
British statesman that they very justifiably
get annoyed. Most Anglicans with an eye for
pluck and simplicity could admire Dr. Clifford
as a Baptist minister. It is when he says that
he is simply a citizen that nobody can possibly
believe him.

But indeed the case is yet more curious than
this. The one argument that used to be urged
for our creedless vagueness was that at least
it saved us from fanaticism. But it does not
even do that. On the contrary, it creates and
renews fanaticism with a force quite peculiar to

so

THE NEW HYPOCRITE

itself. This is at once so strange and so true
that I will ask the reader's attention to it with
a little more precision.

Some people do not like the word " dogma."
Fortunately they are free, and there is an alter-
native for them. There are two things, and
two things only, for the human mind, a dogma
and a prejudice. The Middle Ages were a
rational epoch, an age of doctrine. Our age
is, at its best, a poetical epoch, an age of
prejudice. A doctrine is a definite point; a
prejudice is a direction. That an ox may be
eaten, while a man should not be eaten, is a
doctrine. That as little as possible of any-
thing should be eaten is a prejudice; which is
also sometimes called an ideal. Now a direc-
tion is always far more fantastic than a plan.
I would rather have the most archaic map of
the road to Brighton than a general recom-
mendation to turn to the left. Straight lines
that are not parallel must meet at last; but
curves may recoil forever. A pair of lovers
might walk along the frontier of France and
21

THE NEW HYPOCRITE

Germany, one on the one side and one on the
other, so long as they were not vaguely told
to keep away from each other. And this is a
strictly true parable of the effect of our mod-
ern vagueness in losing and separating men as
in a mist.

It is not merely true that a creed unites
men. Nay, a difference of creed unites men —
so long as it is a clear difference. A boundary
unites. Many a magnanimous Moslem and chiv-
alrous Crusader must have been nearer to each
other, because they were both dogmatists, than
any two homeless agnostics in a pew of Mr.
Campbell's chapel. "I say God is One," and
" I say God is One but also Three," that is
the beginning of a good quarrelsome, manly
friendship. But our age would turn these
creeds into tendencies. It would tell the Trin-
itarian to follow multiplicity as such (because
it was his " temperament "), and he would turn
up later with three hundred and thirty-three
persons in the Trinity. Meanwhile, it would
turn the Moslem into a Monist: a frightful

THE NEW HYPOCRITE

intellectual fall. It would force that previ-
ously healthy person not only to admit that
there was one God, but to admit that there
was nobody else. When each had, for a long
enough period, followed the gleam of his own
nose (like the Dong) they would appear again ;
the Christian a Polytheist, and the Moslem a
Panegoist, both quite mad, and far more unfit
to understand each other than before.

It is exactly the same with politics. Our
political vagueness divides men, it does not fuse
them. Men will walk along the edge of a chasm
in clear weather, but they will edge miles away
from it in a fog. So a Tory can walk up to
the very edge of Socialism, if he knows what is
Socialism. But if he is told that Socialism
is a spirit, a sublime atmosphere, a noble, in-
definable tendency, why, then he keeps out of
its way; and quite right too. One can meet
an assertion with argument; but healthy big-
otry is the only way in which one can meet a
tendency. I am told that the Japanese method
of wrestling consists not of suddenly pressing,

THE NEW HYPOCRITE

but of suddenly giving way. This is one of
my many reasons for disliking the Japanese
civilization. To use surrender as a weapon is
the very worst spirit of the East. But cer-
tainly there is no force so hard to fight as the
force which it is easy to conquer ; the force that
always yields and then returns. Such is the
force of a great impersonal prejudice, such a.9
possesses the modern world on so many points.
Against this there is no weapon at all except
a rigid and steely sanity, a resolution not to
listen to fads, and not to be infected by
diseases.

In short, the rational human faith must ar-
mor itself with prejudice in an age of prej-
udices, just as it armored itself with logic
in an age of logic. But the difference between
the two mental methods is marked and un-
mistakable. The essential of the difference is
this: that prejudices are divergent, whereas
creeds are always in collision. Believers bump
into each other; whereas bigots keep out of
each other's way. A creed is a collective thing,
24

THE NEW HYPOCRITE

and even its sins are sociable. A prejudice is
a private thing, and even its tolerance is mis-
anthropic. So it is with our existing divisions.
They keep out of each other's way; the Tory
paper and the Radical paper do not answer
each other; they ignore each other. Genuine
controversy, fair cut and thrust before a com-
mon audience, has become in our special epoch
very rare. For the sincere controversialist is
above all things a good listener. The really
burning enthusiast never interrupts ; he listens
to the enemy's arguments as eagerly as a spy
would listen to the enemy's arrangements.
But if you attempt an actual argument with a
modern paper of opposite politics, you will find
that no medium is admitted between violence
and evasion. You will have no answer except
slanging or silence. A modern editor must
not have that eager ear that goes with the
honest tongue. He may be deaf and silent ; and
that is called dignity. Or he may be deaf and
noisy; and that is called slashing journalism.
In neither case is there any controversy ; for the

its

THE NEW HYPOCRITE

whole object of modern party combatants is
to charge out of earshot.

The only logical cure for all this is the as-
sertion of a human ideal. In dealing with this,
I will try to be as little transcendental as is
consistent with reason; it is enough to say
that unless we have some doctrine of a divine
man, all abuses may be excused, since evolu-
tion may turn them into uses. It will b'e easy
for the scientific plutocrat to maintain that
humanity will adapt itself to any conditions
which we now consider evil. The old tyrants
invoked the past; the new tyrants will invoke
the future. Evolution has produced the snail
and the owl ; evolution can produce a workman
who wants no more space than a snail, and no
more light than an owl. The employer need
not mind sending a Kaffir to work underground ;
he will soon become an underground animal,
like a mole. He need not mind sending a diver
to hold his breath in the deep seas; he will
soon be a deep-sea animal. Men need not
trouble to alter conditions; conditions will so
20

THE NEW HYPOCRITE

soon alter men. The head can be beaten small
enough to fit the hat. Do not knock the fet-
ters off the slave ; knock the slave until he for-
gets the fetters. To all this plausible modern
argument for oppression, the only adequate an-
swer is, that there is a permanent human ideal
that must not be either confused or destroyed.
The most important man on earth is the per-
fect man who is not there. The Christian re-
ligion has specially uttered the ultimate sanity
of Man, says Scripture, who shall judge the
incarnate and human truth. Our lives and laws
are not judged by divine superiority, but sim-
ply by human perfection. It is man, says
Aristotle, who is the measure. It is the Son
of Man, says Scripture, who shall judge the
quick and the dead.

Doctrine, therefore, does not cause dissen-
sions ; rather a doctrine alone can cure our dis-
sensions. It is necessary to ask, however,
roughly, what abstract and ideal shape in state
or family would fulfill the human hunger ; and
this apart from whether we can completely ob-
27

THE NEW HYPOCRITE

tain it or not. But when we come to ask what
is the need of normal men, what is the desire
of all nations, what is the ideal house, or road,
or rule, or republic, or king, or priesthood,
then we are confronted with a strange and ir-
ritating difficulty peculiar to the present time ;
and we must call a temporary halt and ex-
amine that obstacle.

IV

THE FEAR OF THE PAST

THE last few decades have been marked by a
special cultivation of the romance of the future.
We seem to have made up our minds to mis-
understand what has happened; and we turn,
with a sort of relief, to stating what will hap-
pen— which is (apparently) much easier. The
modern man no longer preserves the memoirs
of his great-grandfather; but he is engaged
in writing a detailed and authoritative biog-
raphy of his great-grandson. Instead of
trembling before the specters of the dead, we
shudder abjectly under the shadow of the babe
unborn. This spirit is apparent everywhere,
even to the creation of a form of futurist ro-
mance. Sir Walter Scott stands at the dawn
of the nineteenth century for the novel of the
past; Mr. H. G. Wells stands at the dawn of
the twentieth century for the novel of the

THE FEAR OF THE PAST

future. The old story, we know, was supposed
to begin: "Late on a winter's evening two

horsemen might have been seen ." The

new story has to begin : " Late on a winter's

evening two aviators will be seen ." The

movement is not without its elements of charm ;
there is something spirited, if eccentric, in the
sight of so many people fighting over again
the fights that have not yet happened; of
people still glowing with the memory of to-
morrow morning. A man in advance of the
age is a familiar phrase enough. An age in
advance of the age is really rather odd.

But when full allowance has been made for
this harmless element of poetry and pretty
human perversity in the thing, I shall not hesi-
tate to maintain here that this cult of the
future is not only a weakness but a cowardice
of the age. It is the peculiar evil of this epoch
that even its pugnacity is fundamentally fright-
ened ; and the Jingo is contemptible not because
he is impudent, but because he is timid. The
reason why modern armaments do not inflame
30

THE FEAR OF THE PAST

the imagination like the arms and emblazon-
ments of the Crusades is a reason quite apart
from optical ugliness or beauty. Some battle-
ships are as beautiful as the sea; and many
Norman nosepieces were as ugly as Norman
noses. The atmospheric ugliness that sur-
rounds our scientific war is an emanation from
that evil panic which is at the heart of it.
The charge of the Crusades was a charge; it
was charging towards God, the wild consola-
tion of the braver. The charge of the modern
armaments is not a charge at all. It is a rout,
a retreat, a flight from the devil, who will
catch the hindmost. It is impossible to im-
agine a mediaeval knight talking of longer and
longer French lances, with precisely the quiv-
ering employed about larger and larger Ger-
man ships. The man who called the Blue Water
School the J< Blue Funk School" uttered a
psychological truth which that school itself
would scarcely essentially deny. Even the two-
power standard, if it be a necessity, is in a
sense a degrading necessity. Nothing has
31

THE FEAR OF THE PAST

more alienated many magnanimous minds from
Imperial enterprises than the fact that they
are always exhibited as stealthy or sudden de-
fenses against a world of cold rapacity and
fear. The Boer War, for instance, was colored
not so much by the creed that we were doing
something right, as by the creed that Boers
and Germans were probably doing something
wrong; driving us (as it was said) to the sea.
Mr. Chamberlain, I think, said that the war
was a feather in his cap ; and so it was : a white
feather.

Now this same primary panic that I feel in
our rush towards patriotic armaments I feel
also in our rush towards future visions of so-
ciety. The modern mind is forced towards the
future by a certain sense of fatigue, not un-
mixed with terror, with which it regards the
past. It is propelled towards the coming time ;
it is, in the exact words of the popular phrase,
knocked into the middle of next week. And
the goad which drives it on thus eagerly is
not an affectation for futurity. Futurity does

THE FEAR OF THE PAST

not exist, because it is still future. Rather it
is a fear of the past ; a fear not merely of the
evil in the past, but of the good in the past
also. The brain breaks down under the un-
bearable virtue of mankind. There have been
so many flaming faiths that we cannot hold;
so many harsh heroisms that we cannot imitate ;
so many great efforts of monumental building
or of military glory which seem to us at once
sublime and pathetic. The future is a refuge
from the fierce competition of our forefathers.
The older generation, not the younger, is
knocking at our door. It is agreeable to es-
cape, as Henley said, into the Street of By-
and-Bye, where stands the Hostelry of Never.
It is pleasant to play with children, especially
unborn children. The future is a blank wall
on which every man can write his own name as
large as he likes ; the past I find already cov-
ered with illegible scribbles, such as Plato,
Isaiah, Shakespeare, Michael Angelo, Napo-
leon. I can make the future as narrow as my-
self ; the past is obliged to be as broad and tur-

THE FEAR OF THE PAST

bulent as humanity. And the upshot of this
modern attitude is really this : that men invent
new ideals because they dare not attempt old
ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm, be-
cause they are afraid to look back.

Now in history there is no Revolution that
is not a Restoration. Among the many things
that leave me doubtful about the modern habit
of fixing eyes on the future, none is stronger
than this : that all the men in history who
have really done anything with the future have
had their eyes fixed upon the past. I need not
mention the Renaissance, the very word proves
my case. The originality of Michael Angelo
and Shakespeare began with the digging up
of old vases and manuscripts. The mildness
of poets absolutely arose out of the mildness
of antiquaries. So the great mediaeval revival
was a memory of the Roman Empire. So the
Reformation looked back to the Bible and Bible
times. So the yncdern Catholic movement has
looked back to /pajtHstic times. But that mod-
ern movement whjch tnany would count the most

„.

THE FEAR OF THE PAST

anarchic of all is in this sense the most con-
servative of all. Never was the past more
venerated by men than it was by the French
Revolutionists. They invoked the little re*
publics of antiquity with the complete confi-
dence of one who invokes the gods. The Sans-
culottes believed (as their name might imply)
in a return to simplicity. They believed most
piously in a remote past; some might call it
a mythical past. For some strange reason man
must always thus plant his fruit trees in a
{graveyard. Man can only find life among
the dead. Man is a misshappen monster, with
his feet set forward and his face turned back.
He can make the future luxuriant and gigan-
tic, so long as he is thinking about the past.
When he tries to think about the future itself,
his mind diminishes to a pin point with im-
becility, which some call Nirvana. To-morrow
is the Gorgon; a man must only see it mir-
rored in the shining shield of yesterday. If he
sees it directly he is turned to stone. This has
been the fate of all those who have really seen
85

THE FEAR OF THE PAST

fate and futurity as clear and inevitable. The
Calvinists, with their perfect creed of predesti-
nation, were turned to stone. The modern so-
ciological scientists (with their excruciating1
Eugenics) are turned to stone. The only dif-
ference is that the Puritans make dignified, and
the Eugenists somewhat amusing, statues.

But there is one feature in the past which
more than all the rest defies and depresses the
moderns and drives them towards this feature-
less future. I mean the presence in the past of
huge ideals, unfulfilled and sometimes aban-
doned. The sight of these splendid failures is
melancholy to a restless and rather morbid gen-
eration ; and they maintain a strange silence
about them — sometimes amounting to an un-
scrupulous silence. They keep them entirely out
of their newspapers and almost entirely out of
their history books. For example, they will
often tell you (in their praises of the coming
age) that we are moving on towards a United
States of Europe. But they carefully omit to
tell you that we are moving away from a United
86

THE FEAR OF THE PAST

States of Europe; that such a thing existed
literally in Roman and essentially in mediaeval
times. They never admit that the international
hatreds (which they call barbaric) are really
very recent, the mere breakdown of the ideal
of the Holy Roman Empire. Or again, they
will tell you that there is going to be a social
revolution, a great rising of the poor against
the rich; but they never rub it in that France
made that magnificent attempt, unaided, and
that we and all the world allowed it to be
trampled out and forgotten. I say decisively
that nothing is so marked in modern writing
as the prediction of such ideals in the future
combined with the ignoring of them in the past.
Anyone can test this for himself. Read any
thirty or forty pages of pamphlets advocating
peace in Europe and see how many of them
praise the old Popes or Emperors for keeping
the peace in Europe. Read any armful of es-
says and poems in praise of social democracy,
and see how many of them praise the old Jaco-
bins who created democracy and died for it.
37

THE FEAR OF THE PAST

These colossal ruins are to the modern only
enormous eyesores. He looks back along the
valley of the past and sees a perspective of
splendid but unfinished cities. They are un-
finished, not always through enmity or acci-
dent, but often through fickleness, mental
fatigue, and the lust for alien philosophies.
We have not only left undone those things
that we ought to have done, but we have
even left undone those things that we wanted
to do.

It is very currently suggested that the mod-
ern man is the heir of all the ages, that he
has got the good out of these successive human
experiments. I know not what to say in an-
swer to this, except to ask the reader to look
at the modern man, as I have just looked at
the modern man — in the looking-glass. Is it
really true that you 'and I are two starry
towers built up of all the most towering visions
of the past? Have we really fulfilled all the
great historic ideals one after the other, from
our naked ancestor who was brave enough to
38

THE FEAR OF THE PAST

kill a mammoth with a stone knife, through
the Greek citizen and the Christian saint to
our own grandfather or great-grandfather, who
may have been sabred by the Manchester Yeo*
manry or shot in the '48? Are we still strong
enough to spear mammoths, but now tender
enough to spare them? Does the cosmos con-
tain any mammoth that we have either speared
or spared? When we decline (in a marked man-
ner) to fly the red flag and fire across a barri-
cade like our grandfathers, are we really de-
clining in deference to sociologists — or to
soldiers ? Have we indeed outstripped the war-
rior and passed the ascetical saint? I fear we
only outstrip the warrior in the sense that we
should probably run away from him. And if
we have passed the saint, I fear we have passed
him without bowing.

This is, first and foremost, what I mean by
the narrowness of the new ideas, the limiting ef-
fect of the future. Our modern prophetic ideal-
ism is narrow because it has undergone a per-
sistent process of elimination. We must ask for
59

THE FEAR OF THE PAST

new things because we are not allowed to ask for
old things. The whole position is based on this
idea that we have got all the good that can be
got out of the ideas of the past. But we have
not got all the good out of them, perhaps at
this moment not any of the good out of them.
And the need here is a need of complete freedom
for restoration as well as revolution.

We often read nowadays of the valor or
audacity with which some rebel attacks a hoary
tyranny or an antiquated superstition. There
is not really any courage at all in attacking
hoary or antiquated things, any more than
in offering to fight one's grandmother. The
really courageous man is he who defies tyran-
nies young as the morning and superstitions
fresh as the first flowers. The only true free-
thinker is he whose intellect is as much free
from the future as from the past. He cares as
little for what will be as for what has been ; he
cares only for what ought to be. And for my
present purpose I specially insist on this ab-
stract independence. If I am to discuss what
40

THE FEAR OF THE PAST

is wrong, one of the first things that are wrong
is this : the deep and silent modern assumption
that past things have become impossible.
There is one metaphor of which the moderns
are very fond ; they are always saying, " You
can't put the clock back." The simple and ob-
vious answer is " You can." A clock, being a
piece of human construction, can be restored
by the human finger to any figure or hour. In
the same way society, being a piece of human
construction, can be reconstructed upon any
plan that has ever existed.

There is another proverb, "As you have
made your bed, so you must lie on it " ; which
again is simply a lie. If I have made my bed
uncomfortable, please God I will make it again.
We could restore the Heptarchy or the stage
coaches if we chose. It might take some time
to do, and it might be very inadvisable to do
it ; but certainly it is not impossible as bringing
back last Friday is impossible. This is, as I
say, the first freedom that I claim : the freedom
to restore. I claim a right to propose as a solu-
41

THE FEAR OF THE PAST

tion the old patriarchal system of a Highland
clan, if that should seem to eliminate the larg-
est number of evils. It certainly would elimi-
nate some evils; for instance, the unnatural
sense of obeying cold and harsh strangers, mere
bureaucrats and policemen. I claim the right
to propose the complete independence of the
small Greek or Italian towns, a sovereign city
of Brixton or Brompton, if that seems the best
way out of our troubles. It would be a way
out of some of our troubles ; we could not have
in a small state, for instance, those enormous
illusions about men or measures which are
nourished by the great national or international
newspapers. You could not persuade a city
state that Mr. Beit was an Englishman, or Mr.
Dillon aj3esperado, any more than you could
persuade a Hampshire village that the village
drunkard was a teetotaler or the village idiot
a statesman. Nevertheless, I do not as a fact
propose that the Browns and the Smiths should
be collected under separate tartans. Nor do I
even propose that Clapham should declare its

THE FEAR OF THE PAST

independence. I merely declare my independ-
ence. I merely claim my choice of all the tools
in the universe ; and I shall not admit that any
of them are blunted merely because they have
been used.

43

THE UNFINISHED TEMPLE

THE task of modern idealists indeed is made
much too easy for them by the fact that they
are always taught that if a thing has been
defeated it has been disproved. Logically, the
case is quite clearly the other way. The lost
causes are exactly those which might have saved
the world. If a man says that the Young Pre-
tender would have made England happy, it is
hard to answer him. If anyone says that the
Georges made England happy, I hope we all
know what to answer. That which was pre-
vented is always impregnable; and the only
perfect King of England was he who was
smothered. Exactly because Jacobitism failed
we cannot call it a failure. Precisely because
the Commune collapsed as a rebellion we cannot
say that it collapsed as a system. But such
outbursts were brief or incidental. Few people
44

THE UNFINISHED TEMPLE

realize how many of the largest efforts, the
facts that will fill history, were frustrated in
their full design and come down to us as gi-
gantic cripples. I have only space to allude
to the two largest facts of modern history:
the Catholic Church and that modern growth
rooted in the French Revolution.

When four knights scattered the blood and
brains of St. Thomas of Canterbury, it was not
only a sign of anger but of a sort of black ad-
miration. They wished for his blood, but they
wished even more for his brains. Such a blow
will remain forever unintelligible unless we
realize what the brains of St. Thomas were
thinking about just before they were distributed
over the floor. They were thinking about the
great mediaeval conception that the church is
the judge of the world. Becket objected to a
priest being tried even by the Lord Chief Jus-
tice. And his reason was simple: because
the Lord Chief Justice was being tried by the
priest. The judiciary was itself sub-judlce.
The kings were themselves in the dock. The
45

THE UNFINISHED TEMPLE

idea was to create an invisible kingdom, with-
out armies or prisons, but with complete free-
dom to condemn publicly all the kingdoms of
the earth. Whether such a supreme church
would have cured society we cannot affirm
definitely; because the church never was a su-
preme church. We only know that in Egland
at any rate the princes conquered the saints.
What the world wanted we see before us ; and
some of us call it a failure. But we cannot call
what the church wanted a failure, simply be-
cause the church failed. Tracy struck a little
too soon. England had not yet made the great
Protestant discovery that the king can do no
wrong. The king was whipped in the cathe-
dral ; a performance which I recommend to those
who regret the unpopularity of church-going.
But the discovery was made ; and Henry VHI.
scattered Becket's bones as easily as Tracy had
scattered his brains.

Of course, I mean that Catholicism was not
tried ; plenty of Catholics were tried, and found
guilty. My point is that the world did not
46

THE UNFINISHED TEMPLE

tire of the church's ideal, but of its reality.
Monasteries were impugned not for the chastity
of monies, but for the unchastity of monks.
Christianity was unpopular not because of the
humility, but of the arrogance of Christians.
Certainly, if the church failed it was largely
through the churchmen. But at the same time
hostile elements had certainly begun to end it
long before it could have done its work. In
the nature of things it needed a common scheme
of life and thought in Europe. Yet the me-
diaeval system began to be broken to pieces in-
tellectually, long before it showed the slightest
hint of falling to pieces morally. The huge
early heresies, like the Albigenses, had not the
faintest excuse in moral superiority. And it is
actually true that the Reformation began to
tear Europe apart before the Catholic Church
had had time to pull it together. The Prus-
sians, for instance, were not converted to Chris-
tianity at all until quite close to the Reforma-
tion. The poor creatures hardly had time to be-
come Catholics before they were told to become
47

THE UNFINISHED TEMPLE

Protestants. This explains a great deal of their
subsequent conduct. But I have only taken this
as the first and most evident case of the gen-
eral truth: that the great ideals of the past
failed not by being outlived (which must mean
over-lived), but by not being lived enough.
Mankind has not passed through the Middle
!Ages. Rather mankind has retreated from the
Middle Ages in reaction and rout. The Chris-
tian ideal has not been tried and found wanting.
It has been found difficult ; and left untried.

It is, of course, the same in the case of the
French Revolution. A great part of our
present perplexity arises from the fact that
the French Revolution has half succeeded and
half failed. In one sense, Valmy was the de-
cisive battle of the West, and in another Trafal-
gar. We have, indeed, destroyed the largest
territorial tyrannies, and created a free peas-
antry in almost all Christian countries except
England; of which we shall say more anon.
But representative government, the one uni-
yersal relic, is a very poor fragment of the
48

THE UNFINISHED TEMPLE

full republican idea. The theory of the French
Revolution presupposed two things in govern-
ment, things which it achieved at the time, but
which it has certainly not bequeathed to its imi-
tators in England, Germany, and America.
The first of these was the idea of honorable
poverty ; that a statesman must be something
of a stoic ; the second was the idea of extreme
publicity. Many imaginative English writers,
including Carlyle, seem quite unable to imagine
how it was that men like Robespierre and Marat
were ardently admired. The best answer is
that they were admired for being poor — poor
when they might have been rich.

No one will pretend that this ideal exists
at all in the haute politique of this country.
Our national claim to political incorruptibility
is actually based on exactly the opposite argu-
ment; it is based on the theory that wealthy
men in assured positions will have no tempta-
tion to financial trickery. Whether the history
of the English aristocracy, from the spoliation
of the monasteries to the annexation of the
49

THE UNFINISHED TEMPLE

mines, entirely supports this theory I am not
now inquiring; but certainly it is our theory,
that wealth will be a protection against politi-
cal corruption. The English statesman is
bribed not to be bribed. He is born with a
silver spoon in his mouth, so that he may never
afterwards be found with the silver spoons in
his pocket. So strong is our faith in this pro-
tection by plutocracy, that we are more and
more trusting our empire in the hands of
families which inherit wealth without either
blood or manners. Some of our political
houses are parvenue by pedigree ; they hand on
vulgarity like a coat-of-arms. In the case of
many a modern statesman to say that he is
born with a silver spoon in his mouth, is at
once inadequate and excessive. He is born with
a silver knife in his mouth. But all this only
illustrates the English theory that poverty is
perilous for a politician.

It will be the same if we compare the condi-
tions that have come about with the Revolu-
tion legend touching publicity. The old
50

THE UNFINISHED TEMPLE

democratic doctrine was that the more light
that was let in to all departments of State, the
easier it was for a righteous indignation to
move promptly against wrong. In other
words, monarchs were to live in glass houses,
(that mobs might throw stones. Again, no
admirer of existing English politics (if there
is any admirer of existing English politics)
will really pretend that this ideal of publicity
is exhausted, or even attempted. Obviously
public life grows more private every day. The
French have, indeed, continued the tradition
of revealing secrets and making scandals ; hence
they are more flagrant and palpable than we,
not in sin, but in the confession of sin. The
first trial of Dreyfus might have happened in
England; it is exactly the second trial that
would have been legally impossible. But, in-
deed, if we wish to realize how far we fall short
of the original republican outline, the sharpest
way to test it is to note how far we fall short
even of the republican element in the older r£-
gime. Not only are we less democratic than
51

THE UNFINISHED TEMPLE

Danton and Condorcet, but we are in many
ways less democratic than Choiseuil and Marie
Antoinette. The richest nobles before the revolt
were needy middle-class people compared with
our Rothschilds and Roseberys. And in the
matter of publicity the old French monarchy
was infinitely more democratic than any of the
monarchies of to-day. Practically anybody
who chose could walk into the palace and see
the king playing with his children, or paring
his nails. The people possessed the monarch,
as the people possess Primrose Hill; that is,
they cannot move it, but they can sprawl all
over it. The old French monarchy was founded
on the excellent principle that a cat may look
at a king. But nowadays a cat may not look
at a king; unless it is a very tame cat. Even
where the press is free for criticism it is only
used for adulation. The substantial difference
comes to something uncommonly like this :
Eighteenth century tyranny meant that you
could say " The K — of Br rd is a prof-
ligate." Twentieth century liberty really
M

THE UNFINISHED TEMPLE

means that you are allowed to say " The King
of Brentford is a model family man."

But we have delayed the main argument
too long for the parenthetical purpose of show-
ing that the great democratic dream, like the
great mediaeval dream, has in a strict and prac-
tical sense been a dream unfulfilled. Whatever
is the matter with modern England it is not
that we have carried out too literally, or
achieved with disappointing completeness,
either the Catholicism of Becket or the equality
of Marat. Now I have taken these two cases
merely because they are typical of ten thousand
other cases; the world is full of these unful-
filled ideas, these uncompleted temples. History
does not consist of completed and crumbling
ruins ; rather it consists of half-built villas
abandoned by a bankrupt-builder. This world
is more like an unfinished suburb than a de-
serted cemetery.

VI

THE ENEMIES OF PROPERTY

BUT it is for this especial reason that such an
explanation is necessary on the very thresh-
old of the definition of ideals. For owing to
that historic fallacy with which I have just
dealt, numbers of readers will expect me, when
I propound an ideal, to propound a new ideal.
Now I have no notion at all of propounding a
new ideal. There is no new ideal imaginable by
the madness of modern sophists, which will be
anything like so startling as fulfilling any one
of the old ones. On the day that any copybook
maxim is carried out there will be something
like an earthquake on the earth. There is only
one thing new that can be done under the sun ;
and that is to look at the sun. If you attempt
it on a blue day in June, you will know why
men do not look straight at their ideals. There
is only one really startling thing to be done
54

ENEMIES OF PROPERTY

with the ideal, and that is to do it. It is to
face the flaming logical fact, and its frightful
consequences. Christ knew that it would be a
more stunning thunderbolt to fulfill the law than
to destroy it. It is true of both the cases I
have quoted, and of every case. The pagans
had always adored purity: Athene, Artemis,
Vesta. It was when the virgin martyrs began
defiantly to practice purity that they rent them
with wild beasts, and rolled them on red-hot
coals. The world had always loved the notion
of the poor man uppermost; it can be proved
by every legend from Cinderella to Whitting-
ton, by every poem from the Magnificat to the
Marseillaise. The kings went mad against
France not because she idealized this ideal, but
because she realized it. Joseph of Austria
and Catherine of Russia quite agreed that
the people should rule; what horrified them
was that the people did. The French Revo-
lution, therefore, is the type of all true revo-
lutions, because its ideal is as old as the Old
Adam, but its fulfillment almost as fresh, as
65

ENEMIES OF PROPERTY

miraculous, and as new as the New Jerusa-
lem.

But in the modern world we are primarily
confronted with the extraordinary spectacle of
people turning to new ideals because they have
not tried the old. Men have not got tired of
Christianity; they have never found enough
Christianity to get tired of. Men have never
wearied of political justice ; they have wearied
of waiting for it.

Now, for the purpose of this book, I pro-
pose to take only one of these old ideals; but
one that is perhaps the oldest. I take the prin-
ciple of domesticity: the ideal house; the
happy family, the holy family of history. For
the moment it is only necessary to remark that
it is like the church and like the republic, now
chiefly assailed by those who have never known
it, or by those who have failed to fulfill it. Num-
berless modern women have rebelled against
domesticity in theory because they have never
known it in practice. Hosts of the poor are
driven to the workhouse without ever having
56

ENEMIES OF PROPERTY

known the house. Generally speaking, the cul-
tured class is shrieking to be let out of the
decent home, just as the working class is shout-
ing to be let into it.

Now if we take this house or home as a test,
we may very generally lay the simple spiritual
foundations or the idea. God is that which
can make something out of nothing. Man (it
may truly be said) is that which can make
something out of anything. In other words,
while the joy of God be unlimited creation, the
special joy of man is limited creation, the com-
bination of creation with limits. Man's pleas-
ure, therefore, is to possess conditions, but also
to be partly possessed by them ; to be half-
controlled by the flute he plays or by the field
he digs. The excitement is to get the utmost
out of given conditions ; the conditions will
stretch, but not indefinitely. A man can write
an immortal sonnet on an old envelope, or hack
a hero out of a lump of rock. But hacking a
sonnet out of a rock would be a laborious busi-
ness, and making a hero out of an envelope is
57

ENEMIES OF PROPERTY

almost out of the sphere of practical politics.
This fruitful strife with limitations, when it
concerns some airy entertainment of an edu-
cated class, goes by the name of Art. But the
mass of men have neither time nor aptitude for
the invention of invisible or abstract beauty.
For the mass of men the idea of artistic crea-
tion can only be expressed by an idea un-
popular in present discussions — the idea of
property. The average man cannot cut clay
into the shape of a man; but he can cut earth
into the shape of a garden ; and though he ar-
ranges it with red geraniums and blue potatoes
in alternate straight lines, he is still an artist ;
because he has chosen. The average man can-
not paint the sunset whose colors he admires ;
but he can paint his own house with what
color he chooses, and though he paints it pea
green with pink spots, he is still an artist ; be-
cause that is his choice. Property is merely
the art of the democracy. It means that every
man should have something that he can shape
in his own image, as he is shaped in the image
58

ENEMIES OF PROPERTY

of heaven. But because he is not God, but only
a graven image of God, his self-expression
must deal with limits ; properly with limits that
are strict and even small.

I am well aware that the word " property "
has been defied in our time by the corruption
of the great capitalists. One would think, to
hear people talk, that the Rothschilds and the
Rockefellers were on the side of property. But
obviously they are the enemies of property;
because they are enemies of their own limita-
tions. They do not want their own land; but
other people's. When they remove their neigh-
bor's landmark, they also remove their own.
A man who loves a little triangular field ought
to love it because it is triangular; anyone who
destroys the shape, by giving him more land,
is a thief who has stolen a triangle. A man
with the true poetry of possession wishes to
see the wall where his garden meets Smith's
garden; the hedge where his farm touches
Brown's. He cannot see the shape of his own
land unless he sees the edges of his neigh-
59

ENEMIES OF PROPERTY

foor*s. It is the negation of property that
the Duke of Sutherland should have all the
farms in one estate; just as it would be the
negation of marriage if he had all our wives in,
one harem.

60

VII

THE FREE FAMILY

As I have said, I propose to take only one
central instance; I will take the institution
called the private house or home ; the shell and
organ of the family. We will consider cosmic
and political tendencies simply as they strike
that ancient and unique roof. Very few words
will suffice for all I have to say about the family
itself. I leave alone the speculations about its
animal origin and the details of its social re-
construction; I am concerned only with its
palpable omnipresence. It is a necessity for
mankind; it is (if you like to put it so) a trap
for mankind. Only by the hypocritical ignor-
ing of a huge fact can anyone contrive to talk
of " free love " ; as if love were an episode like
lighting a cigarette, or whistling a tune. Sup-
pose whenever a man lit a cigarette, a tower-
ing genie arose from the rings of smoke and
61

THE FREE FAMILY

followed him everywhere as a huge slave. Sup-
pose whenever a man whistled a tune he " drew
an angel down" and had to walk about for-
ever with a seraph on a string. These catas-
trophic images are but faint parallels to the
earthquake consequences that Nature has at-
tached to sex; and it is perfectly plain at the
beginning that a man cannot be a free lover;
he is either a traitor or a tied man. The sec-
ond element that creates the family is that its
consequences, though colossal, are gradual ; the
cigarette produces a baby giant, the song only
an infant seraph. Thence arises the necessity
for some prolonged system of co-operation ; and
thence arises the family in its full educational
sense.

It may be said that this institution of the
home is the one anarchist institution. That is
to say, it is older than law, and stands outside
the State. By its nature it is refreshed or cor-
rupted by indefinable forces of custom or kin-
ship. This is not to be understood as meaning
that the State has no authority over families;

THE FREE FAMILY

that State authority is invoked and ought to
be invoked in many abnormal cases. But in
most normal cases of family joys and sorrows,
the State has no mode of entry. It is not so
much that the law should not interfere, as that
the law cannot. Just as there are fields too
far off for law, so there are fields too near;
as a man may see the North Pole before he
sees his own backbone. Small and near mat-
ters escape control at least as much as vast
and remote ones; and the real pains and pleas-
ures of the family form a strong instance of
this. If a baby cries for the moon, the police-
man cannot procure the moon — but neither can
he stop the baby. Creatures so close to each
other as a husband and wife, or a mother and
children, have powers of making each other
happy or miserable with which no public co-
ercion can deal. If a marriage could be dis-
solved every morning it would not give back
his night's rest to a man kept awake by a
curtain lecture ; and what is the good of giving
a man a lot of power where he only wants a

THE FREE FAMILY

little peace? The child must depend on the
most imperfect mother ; the mother may be de-
voted to the most unworthy children ; in such
relations legal revenges are vain. Even in the
abnormal cases where the law may operate, this
difficulty is constantly found; as many a be-
wildered magistrate knows. He has to save
children from starvation by taking away their
breadwinner. And he often has to break a
wife's heart because her husband has already
broken her head. The State has no tool deli-
cate enough to deracinate the rooted habits
and tangled affections of the family; the two
sexes, whether happy or unhappy, are glued
together too tightly for us to get the blade of
a legal penknife in between them. The man
and the woman are one flesh — yes, even when
they are not one spirit. Man is a quadruped.
Upon this ancient and anarchic intimacy, types
of government have little or no effect; it is
happy or unhappy, by its own sexual whole-
someness and genial habit, under the republic
of Switzerland or the despotism of Siam. Even
64

THE FREE FAMILY

a republic in Siam would not have done much
towards freeing the Siamese Twins.

The problem is not in marriage, but in sex;
and would be felt under the freest concubinage.
Nevertheless, the overwhelming mass of man-
kind has not believed in freedom in this matter,
but rather in a more or less lasting tie. Tribes
and civilizations differ about the occasions on
which we may loosen the bond, but they all
agree that there is a bond to be loosened, not
a mere universal detachment. For the pur-
poses of this book I am not concerned to dis-
cuss that mystical view of marriage in which
I myself believe: the great European tradition
which has made marriage a sacrament. It is
enough to say here that heathen and Christian
alike have regarded marriage as a tie; a thing
not normally to be sundered. Briefly, this hu-
man belief in a sexual bond rests on a principle
of which the modern mind has made a very in-
adequate study. It is, perhaps, most nearly
paralleled by the principle of the second wind in
walking.

65,

THE FREE FAMILY

The principle is this : that in everything
worth having, even in every pleasure, there
is a point of pain or tedium that must be
survived, so that the pleasure may revive and
endure. The joy of battle comes after the first
fear of death; the joy of reading Virgil comes
after the bore of learning him ; the glow of the
sea-bather comes after the icy shock of the
sea bath; and the success of the marriage
comes after the failure of the honeymoon. All
human vows, laws, and contracts are so many
ways of surviving with success this breaking
point, this instant of potential surrender.

In everything on this earth that is worth
doing, there is a stage when no one would do
it, except for necessity or honor. It is then
that the Institution upholds a man and helps
him on to the firmer ground ahead. Whether
this solid fact of human nature is sufficient
to justify the sublime dedication of Christian
marriage is quite another matter, it is amply
sufficient to justify the general human feeling
of marriage as a fixed thing, dissolution of
66

THE FREE FAMILY

which is a fault or, at least, an ignominy. The
essential element is not so much duration as
security. Two people must be tied together in
order to do themselves justice; for twenty min-
utes at a dance, or for twenty years in a mar-
riage. In both cases the point is, that if a
man is bored in the first five minutes he must
go on and force himself to be happy. Coercion
is a kind of encouragement; and anarchy (or
what some call liberty) is essentially oppress-
ive, because it is essentially discouraging. If
we all floated in the air like bubbles, free to
drift anywhere at any instant, the practical
result would be that no one would have the
courage to begin a conversation. It would be
so embarrassing to start a sentence in a friendly
whisper, and then have to shout the last half
of it because the other party was floating
away into the free and formless ether. The
two must hold each other to do justice to each
other. If Americans can be divorced for " in-
compatibility of temper" I cannot conceive
why they are not all divorced. I have known
6T

THE FREE FAMILY

many happy marriages, but never a compatible
one. The whole aim of marriage is to fight
through and survive the instant when incom-
patibility becomes unquestionable. For a man
and a woman, as such, are incompatible.

vni

THE WILDNESS OF DOMESTICITY

IN the course of this crude study we shall have
to touch on what is called the problem of pov-
erty, especially the dehumanized poverty of
modern industrialism. But in this primary
matter of the ideal the difficulty is not the prob-
lem of poverty, but the problem of wealth. It
is the special psychology of leisure and luxury
that falsifies life. Some experience of modern
movements of the sort called " advanced " has
led me to the conviction that they generally
repose upon some experience peculiar to the
rich. It is so with that fallacy of free love of
which I have already spoken ; the idea of sexu-
ality as a string of episodes. That implies a
long holiday in which to get tired of one
woman, and a motor car in which to wander
looking for others ; it also implies money for

WILDNESS OF DOMESTICITY

maintenances. An omnibus conductor has
hardly time to love his own wife, let alone other
people's. And the success with which nuptial
estrangements are depicted in modern "prob-
lem plays " is due to the fact that there is
only one thing that a drama cannot depict — *
that is a hard day's work. I could give many
other instances of this plutocratic assumption
behind progressive fads. For instance, there
is a plutocratic assumption behind the phrase
" Why should woman be economically depend-
ent upon man ? " The answer is that among
poor and practical people she isn't; except in
the sense in which he is dependent upon her.
'A hunter has to tear his clothes; there must
be somebody to mend them. A fisher has to
catch fish; there must be somebody to cook
them. It is surely quite clear that this modern
notion that woman is a mere " pretty clinging
parasite," "a plaything," etc., arose through
the somber contemplation of some rich bank-
ing family, in which the banker, at least, went
to the city and pretended to do something,
70

WILDNESS OF DOMESTICITY

while the banker's wife went to the Park and
did not pretend to do anything at all. A poor
man and his wife are a business partnership.
If one partner in a firm of publishers interviews
the authors while the other interviews the clerks,
is one of them economically dependent? Was
Hodder a pretty parasite clinging to Stough-
ton ? Was Marshall a mere plaything for Snel-
grove ?

But of all the modern notions generated by
mere wealth the worst is this: the notion that
domesticity is dull and tame. Inside the home
(they say) is dead decorum and routine; out-
side is adventure and variety. This is indeed
a rich man's opinion. The rich man knows
that his own house moves on vast and sound-
less wheels of wealth, is run by regiments of
servants, by a swift and silent ritual. On the
other hand, every sort of vagabondage of ro-
mance is open to him in the streets outside.
He has plenty of money and can afford to be
a tramp. His wildest adventure will end in
a restaurant, while the yokel's tamest adven-
71

WILDNESS OF DOMESTICITY

ture may end in a police-court. If he smashes
a window he can pay for it; if he smashes a
man he can pension him. He can (like the mil-
lionaire in the story) buy an hotel to get a
glass of gin. And because he, the luxurious
man, dictates the tone of nearly all " advanced "
and " progressive " thought, we have almost
forgotten what a home really means to the over-
whelming millions of mankind.

For the truth is, that to the moderately poor
the home is the only place of liberty. Nay,
it is the only place of anarchy. It is the only
spot on the earth where a man can alter ar-
rangements suddenly, make an experiment or
indulge in a whim. Everywhere else he goes
he must accept the strict rules of the shop, inn,
club, or museum that he happens to enter. He
can eat his meals on the floor in his own house
if he likes. I often do it myself; it gives a
curious, childish, poetic, picnic feeling. There
would be considerable trouble if I tried to do it
in an A. B. C. tea-shop. A man can wear a
dressing-gown and slippers in his house; while
72

WILDNESS OF DOMESTICITY

I am sure that this would not be permitted at
the Savoy, though I never actually tested the
point. If you go to a restaurant you must
drink some of the wines on the wine list, all of
them if you insist, but certainly some of them.
But if you have a house and garden you can
try to make hollyhock tea or convolvulus wine
if you like. For a plain, hard-working man
the home is not the one tame place in the world
of adventure. It is the one wild place in the
world of rules and set tasks. The home is the
one place where he can put the carpet on the
ceiling or the slates on the floor if he wants
to. When a man spends every night stagger-
ing from bar to bar or from music-hall to music-
hall, we say that he is living an irregular life.
But he is not ; he is living a highly regular
life, under the dull, and often oppressive, laws
of such places. Sometimes he is not allowed
even to sit down in the bars ; and frequently he
is not allowed to sing in the music-halls.
Hotels may be defined as places where you are
forced to dress ; and theaters may be defined
73

WILDNESS OF DOMESTICITY

as places where you are forbidden to smoke.
A man can only picnic at home.

Now I take, as I have said, this small human
omnipotence, this possession of a definite cell
or chamber of liberty, as the working model
for the present inquiry. Whether we can give
every Englishman a free home of his own or
not, at least we should desire it ; and he desires
it. For the moment we speak of what he wants,
not of what he expects to get. He wants, for
instance, a separate house; he does not want
a semi-detached house. He may be forced in
the commercial race to share one wall with an-
other man. Similarly he might be forced in
a three-legged race to share one leg with an-
other man; but it is not so that he pictures
himself in his dreams of elegance and liberty.
Again, he does not desire a flat. He can eat
and sleep and praise God in a flat ; he can eat
and sleep and praise God in a railway train.
But a railway train is not a house, because it
is a house on wheels. And a flat is not a house,
because it is a house on stilts. An idea of
74

WILDNESS OF DOMESTICITY

earthy contact and foundation, as well as an
idea of separation and independence, is a part
of this instructive human picture.

I take, then, this one institution as a test.
'As every normal man desires a woman, and
children born of a woman, every normal man
desires a house of his own to put them into.
He does not merely want a roof above him and
a chair below him; he wants an objective and
visible kingdom; a fire at which he can cook
what food he likes, a door he can open to what
friends he chooses. This is the normal appetite
of men; I do not say there are not exceptions.
There may be saints above the need and philan-
thropists below it. Opalstein, now he is a
duke, may have got used to more than this;
and when he was a convict may have got used
to less. But the normality of the thing is
enormous. To give nearly everybody ordinary
houses would please nearly everybody; that
is what I assert without apology. Now in
modern England (as you eagerly point out)
it is very difficult to give nearly everybody
75

WILDNESS OF DOMESTICITY

houses. Quite so; I merely set up the desider-
atum; and ask the reader to leave it standing
there while he turns with me to a consideration
of what really happens in the social wars of
our time.

76

IX

HISTORY OF HUDGE AND GUDGE

THERE is, let us say, a certain filthy rookery
in Hoxton, dripping with disease and honey-
combed with crime and promiscuity. There
are, let us say, two noble and courageous young
men, of pure intentions and (if you prefer it)
noble birth ; let us call them Hudge and Gudge.
Hudge, let us say, is of a bustling sort; he
points out that the people must at all costs
be got out of this den ; he subscribes and col-
lects money, but he finds (despite the large fi-
nancial interests of the Hudges) that the thing
will have to be done on the cheap if it is to be
done on the spot. He, therefore, runs up a
row of tall bare tenements like beehives; and
soon has all the poor people bundled into their
little brick cells, which are certainly better
than their old quarters, in so far as they are
weather proof, well ventilated and supplied
77

HUDGE AND GUDGE

with clean water. But Gudge has a more deli-
cate nature. He feels a nameless something
lacking in the little brick boxes ; he raises num-
berless objections ; he even assails the celebrated
Hudge Report, with the Gudge Minority Re-
port; and by the end of a year or so has come
to telling Hudge heatedly that the people were
much happier where they were before. As the
people preserve in both places precisely the
same air of dazed amiability, it is very difficult
to find out which is right. But at least one
might safely say that no people ever liked
stench or starvation as such, but only some
peculiar pleasures entangled with them. Not
so feels the sensitive Gudge. Long before the
final quarrel (Hudge v. Gudge and Another),
Gudge has succeeded in persuading himself that
slums and stinks are really very nice things;
that the habit of sleeping fourteen in a room
is what has made our England great ; and that
the smell of open drains is absolutely essential
to the rearing of a viking breed.

But, meanwhile, has there been no degenera-
78

HUDGE AND GUDGE

tion in Hudge? Alas, I fear there has. Those
maniacally ugly buildings which he originally
put up as unpretentious sheds barely to shelter
human life, grow every day more and more
lovely to his deluded eye. Things he would
never have dreamed of defending, except as
crude necessities, things like common kitchens
or infamous asbestos stoves, begin to shine
quite sacredly before him, merely because they
reflect the wrath of Gudge. He maintains,
with the aid of eager little books by Socialists,
that man is really happier in a hive than in a
house. The practical difficulty of keeping to-
tal strangers out of your bedroom he describes
as Brotherhood ; and the necessity for climbing
twenty-three flights of cold stone stairs, I dare
say he calls Effort. The net result of their
philanthropic adventure is this : that one has
come to defending indefensible slums and still
more indefensible slum-landlords; while the
other has come to treating as divine the sheds
and pipes which he only meant as desperate.
Gudge is now a corrupt and apoplectic old
79

HUDGE AND GUDGE

Tory in the Carlton Club ; if you mention pov-
erty to him he roars at you in a thick, hoarse
voice something that is conjectured to be "Do
'em good ! " Nor is Hudge more happy ; for
he is a lean vegetarian with a gray, pointed
beard and an unnaturally easy smile, who goes
about telling everybody that at last we shall
all sleep in one universal bedroom ; and he lives
in a Garden City, like one forgotten of God.

Such is the lamentable history of Hudge and
Gudge; which I merely introduce as a type of
an endless and exasperating misunderstanding
which is always occurring in modern England.
To get men out of a rookery men are put
into a tenement; and at the beginning the
healthy human soul loathes them both. A
man's first desire is to get away as far as
possible from the rookery, even should his mad
course lead him to a model dwelling. The
second desire is, naturally, to get away from
the model dwelling, even if it should lead a man
back to the rookery. But I am neither a
Hudgian nor a Gudgian; and I think the mis-
80

HUDGE AND GUDGE

takes of these two famous and fascinating per-
sons arose from one simple fact. They arose
from the fact that neither Hudge nor Gudge
had ever thought for an instant what sort of
house a man might probably like for himself.
In short, they did not begin with the ideal;
and, therefore, were not practical politicians.

We may now return to the purpose of our
awkward parenthesis about the praise of the
future and the failures of the past. A house
of his own being the obvious ideal for every
man, we may now ask (taking this need as
typical of all such needs) why he hasn't got
it ; and whether it is in any philosophical sense
his own fault. Now, I think that in some
philosophical sense it is his own fault; I thinlc
in a yet more philosophical sense it is the fault
of his philosophy. And this is what I have
now to attempt to explain.

Burke, a fine rhetorician, who rarely faced
realities, said, I think, that an Englishman's
house is his castle. This is honestly entertain-
ing; for as it happens the Englishman is al-
81

HUDGE AND GUDGE

most the only man in Europe whose house is
not his castle. Nearly everywhere else exists
the assumption of peasant proprietorship ; that
a poor man may be a landlord, though he is
only lord of his own land. Making the land-
lord and the tenant the same person has cer-
tain trivial advantages, as that the tenant pays
no rent, while the landlord does a little work.
But I am not concerned with the defense of
small proprietorship, but merely with the fact
that it exists almost everywhere except in Eng-
land. It is also true, however, that this estate
of small possession is attacked everywhere to-
day ; it has never existed among ourselves, and
it may be destroyed among our neighbors. We
have, therefore, to ask ourselves what it is in
human affairs generally, and in this domestic
ideal in particular, that has really ruined the
natural human creation, especially in this
country.

Man has always lost his way. He has been
a tramp ever since Eden ; but he always knew,
or thought he knew, what he was looking for.
B*

HUDGE AND GUDGE

Every man has a house somewhere in the elabo-
rate cosmos ; his house waits for him waist deep
in slow Norfolk rivers or sunning itself upon
Sussex downs. Man has always been looking
for that home which is the subject matter of
this book. But in the bleak and blinding hail of
skepticism to which he has been now so long
subjected, he has begun for the first time to be
chilled, not merely in his hopes, but in his de-
sires. For the first time in history he begins
really to doub't the object of his wanderings
on the earth. He has always lost his way;
but now he has lost his address.

Under the pressure of certain upper-class
philosophies (or in other words, under the pres-
sure of Hudge and Gudge) the average man
has really become bewildered about the goal
of his efforts ; and his efforts, therefore, grow
feebler and feebler. His simple notion of hav-
ing a home of his own is derided as bourgeois,
as sentimental, or as despicably Christian,
tinder various verbal forms he is recommended
to go on to the streets — which is called In-
83

HUDGE AND GUDGE

dividualism; or to the work-house — which is
called Collectivism. We shall consider this
process somewhat more carefully in a moment.
But it may be said here that Hudge and Gudge,
or the governing class generally, will never fail
for lack of some modern phrase to cover their
ancient predominance. The great lords will
refuse the English peasant his three acres and
a cow on advanced grounds, if they cannot re-
fuse it longer on reactionary grounds. They
will deny him the three acres on grounds of
State Ownership. They will forbid him the
cow on grounds of humanitarianism.

And this brings us to the ultimate analysis
of this singular influence that has prevented
doctrinal demands by the English people.
There are, I believe, some who still deny that
England is governed by an oligarchy. It is
quite enough for me to know that a man might
have gone to sleep some thirty years ago over
the day's newspaper and woke up last week
over the later newspaper, and fancied he was
reading about the same people. In one paper
84

HUDGE AND GUDGE

he would have found a Lord Robert Cecil, a
Mr. Gladstone, a Mr. Lyttleton, a Churchill,
a Chamberlain, a Trevelyan, an Acland. In
the other paper he would find a Lord Robert
Cecil, a Mr. Gladstone, a Mr. Lyttleton, a
Churchill, a Chamberlain, a Trevelyan, an Ac-
land. If this is not being governed by families
I cannot imagine what it is. I suppose it la
being governed by extraordinary democratic
coincidences.

85

OPPRESSION BY OPTIMISM

BUT we are not here concerned with the nature
and existence of the aristocracy, but with the
origin of its peculiar power; why is it the last
of the true oligarchies of Europe; and why
does there seem no very immediate prospect
of our seeing the end of it? The explanation
is simple though it remains strangely unnoticed.
The friends of aristocracy often praise it for
preserving ancient and gracious traditions.
The enemies of aristocracy often blame it for
clinging to cruel or antiquated customs. Both
its enemies and its friends are wrong. Gener-
ally speaking the aristocracy does not preserve
either good or bad traditions; it does not pre-
serve anything except game. Who would
dream of looking among aristocrats anywhere
for an old custom? One might as well look
for an old costume! The god of the aristo-
86

OPPRESSION BY OPTIMISM

crats is not tradition, but fashion, which is
the opposite of tradition. If you wanted to
find an old-world Norwegian head-dress, would
you look for it in the Scandinavian Smart Set?
No ; the aristocrats never have customs ; at the
best they have habits, like the animals. Only
the mob has customs.

The real power of the English aristocrats
has lain in exactly the opposite of tradition.
The simple key to the power of our upper
classes is this: that they have always kept
carefully on the side of what is called Progress.
They have always been up to date, and this
comes quite easy to an aristocracy. For the
aristocracy are the supreme instances of that
frame of mind of which we spoke just now.
Novelty is to them a luxury verging on a ne-
cessity. They, above all, are so bored with
the past and with the present, that they gape,
with a horrible hunger, for the future.

But whatever else the great lords forgot they
never forgot that it was their business to stand
for the new things, for whatever was being most
87

OPPRESSION BY OPTIMISM

talked about among university dons or fussy
financiers. Thus they were on the side of the
Reformation against the Church, of the Whigs
against the Stuarts, of the Baconian science
against the old philosophy, of the manufactur-
ing system against the operatives, and (to-day)
of the increased power of the State against the
old-fashioned individualists. In short, the rich
are always modern; it is their business. But
the immediate effect of this fact upon the ques-
tion we are studying is somewhat singular.

In each of the separate holes or quandaries
in which the ordinary Englishman has been
placed, he has been told that his situation is,
for some particular reason, all for the best.
He woke up one fine morning and discovered
that the public things, which for eight hundred
years he had used at once as inns and sanctu-
aries, had all been suddenly and savagely abol-
ished, to increase the private wealth of about
six or seven men. One would think he might
have been annoyed at that; in many places he
was, and was put down by the soldiery. But
it was not merely the army that kept him quiet.
88

OPPRESSION BY OPTIMISM

He was kept quiet by the sages as well as the
soldiers ; the six or seven men who took away
the inns of the poor told him that they were
not doing it for themselves, but for the religion
of the future, the great dawn of Protestantism
and truth. So whenever a seventeenth century
noble was caught pulling down a peasant's
fence and stealing his field, the noble pointed
excitedly at the face of Charles I. or James
II. (which at that moment, perhaps, wore a
cross expression) and thus diverted the simple
peasant's attention. The great Puritan lords
created the Commonwealth, and destroyed the
common land. They saved their poorer coun-
trymen from the disgrace of paying Ship
Money, by taking from them the plow money
and spade money which they were doubtless
too weak to guard. A fine old English rhyme
has immortalized this easy aristocratic habit — •

You prosecute the man or woman

Who steals the goose from off the common,

But leave the larger felon loose

Who steals the common from the goose.

OPPRESSION BY OPTIMISM

But here, as in the case of the monasteries,
we confront the strange problem of submission.
If they stole the common from the goose, one
can only say that he was a great goose to
stand it. The truth is that they reasoned with
the goose; they explained to him that all this
was needed to get the Stuart fox over seas.
So in the nineteenth century the great nobles
who became mine-owners and railway directors
earnestly assured everybody that they did not
do this from preference, but owing to a newly
discovered Economic Law. So the prosperous
politicians of our own generation introduce
bills to prevent poor mothers from going about
with their own babies; or they calmly forbid
their tenants to drink beer in public inns. But
this insolence is not (as you would suppose)
howled at by everybody as outrageous feudal-
ism. It is gently rebuked as Socialism. For
an aristocracy is always progressive; it is a
form of going the pace. Their parties grow
later and later at night; for they are trying
to live to-morrow.

90

XI

THE HOMELESSNESS OF JONES

THUS the Future of which we spoke at the
beginning has (in England at least) always
been the ally of tyranny. The ordinary Eng-
lishman has been duped out of his old pos-
sessions, such as they were, and always in the
name of progress. The destroyers of the ab-
beys took away his bread and gave him a stone,
assuring him that it was a precious stone, the
white pebble of the Lord's elect. They took
away his maypole and his original rural life
and promised him instead the Golden Age of
Peace and Commerce inaugurated at the Crys-
tal Palace. And now they are taking away the
little that remains of his dignity as a house-
holder and the head of a family, promising him
instead Utopias which are called (appropri-
ately enough) " Anticipations " or " News from
Nowhere." We come back, in fact, to the
91

HOMELESSNESS OF JONES

main feature which has already been men-
tioned. The past is communal: the future
must be individualist. In the past are all the
evils of democracy, variety and violence and
doubt, but the future is pure despotism, for
the future is pure caprice. Yesterday, I know
I was a human fool, but to-morrow I can easily
be the Superman.

The modern Englishman, however, is like
a man who should be perpetually kept out, for
one reason after another, from the house in
which he had meant his married life to begin.
This man (Jones let us call him) has always
desired the divinely ordinary things ; he has
married for love, he has chosen or built a small
house that fits like a coat; he is ready to be a
great grandfather and a local god. And just
as he is moving in, something goes wrong.
Some tyranny, personal or political, suddenly
debars him from the home ; and he has to take
his meals in the front garden. A passing
philosopher (who is also, by a mere coincidence,
the man who turned him out) pauses, and lean-
93

HOMELESSNESS OF JONES

ing elegantly on the railings, explains to him
that he is now living that bold life upon the
bounty of nature which will be the life of the
sublime future. • He finds life in the front gar-
den more bold than bountiful, and has to move
into mean lodgings in the next spring. The
philosopher (who turned him out), happening
to call at these lodgings, with the probable
intention of raising the rent, stops to explain
to him that he is now in the real life of mercan-
tile endeavor; the economic struggle between
him and the landlady is the only thing out of
which, in the sublime future, the wealth of na-
tions can come. He is defeated in the eco-
nomic struggle, and goes to the workhouse.
The philosopher who turned him out (happen-
ing at that very moment to be inspecting the
workhouse) assures him that he is now at last
in that golden republic which is the goal of
mankind ; he is in an equal, scientific, Socialistic
commonwealth, owned by the State and ruled
by public officers ; in fact, the commonwealth of
the sublime future.

03

HOMELESSNESS OF JONES

Nevertheless, there are signs that the irra-
tional Jones still dreams at night of his old
idea of having an ordinary home. He asked
for so little, and he has been offered so much.
He has been offered bribes of worlds and sys-
tems ; he has been offered Eden and Utopia and
the New Jerusalem, and he only wanted a house ;
and that has been refused him.

Such an apologue is literally no exaggera-
tion of the facts of English history. The
rich did literally turn the poor out of the old
guest house on to the road, briefly telling them
that it was the road of progress. They did
literally force them into factories and the mod-
ern wage-slavery, assuring them all the time
that this was the only way to wealth and civili-
zation. Just as they had dragged the rustic
from the convent food and ale by saying that
the streets of heaven were paved with gold,
so now they dragged him from the village
food and ale by telling him that the streets of
London were paved with gold. As he entered
the gloomy porch of Puritanism, so he entered
94.

HOMELESSNESS OF JONES

the gloomy porch of Industrialism, being told
that each of them was the gate of the future.
Hitherto he has only gone from prison to
prison, nay, into darkening prisons, for Cal-
vinism opened one small window upon heaven.
And now he is asked, in the same educated and
authoritative tones, to enter another dark
porch, at which he has to surrender, into unseen
hands, his children, his small possessions and
all the habits of his fathers.

Whether this last opening be in truth any
more inviting than the old openings of Puri-
tanism and Industrialism can be discussed later.
But there can be little doubt, I think, that if
some form of Collectivism is imposed upon Eng-
land it will be imposed, as everything else has
been, by an instructed political class upon a
people partly apathetic and partly hypnotized.
The aristocracy will be as ready to " adminis-
ter" Collectivism as they were to administer
Puritanism or Manchesterism ; in some ways
Buch a centralized political power is necessarily
attractive to them. It will not be so hard as
95

HOMELESSNESS OF JONES

some innocent Socialists seem to suppose to
induce the Honorable Tomnoddy to take over
the milk supply as well as the stamp supply —
at an increased salary. Mr. Bernard Shaw has
remarked that rich men are better than poor
men on parish councils because they are free
from "financial timidity." Now, the English
ruling class is quite free from financial timidity.
The Duke of Sussex will be quite ready to be
Administrator of Sussex at the same screw.
Sir William Harcourt, that typical aristocrat,
put it quite correcty. "We" (that is, the
aristocracy) "are all Socialists now."

But this is not the essential note on which
I desire to end. My main contention is that,
whether necessary or not, both Industrialism
and Collectivism have been accepted as neces-
sities— not as naked ideals or desires. Nobody
liked the Manchester School; it was endured
as the only way of producing wealth. Nobody
likes the Marxian school; it is endured as the
only way of preventing poverty. Nobody's
real heart is in the idea of preventing a free
96

HOMELESSNESS OF JONES

man from owning his own farm, or an old
woman from cultivating her own garden, any
more than anybody's real heart was in the
heartless battle of the machines. The purpose
of this chapter is sufficiently served in indicat-
ing that this proposal also is a pis oiler, a des-
perate second best — like teetotalism. I do not
propose to prove here that Socialism is a poi-
son ; it is enough if I maintain that it is a medi-
cine and not a wine.

The idea of private property universal but
private, the idea of families free but still fami-
lies, of domesticity democratic but still domes-
tic, of one man one house — this remains the real
vision and magnet of mankind. The world
may accept something more official and general,
less human and intimate. But the world will
be like a broken-hearted woman who makes a
humdrum marriage because she may not make
a happy one; Socialism may be the world's
deliverance, but it is not the world's desire.

97

PART n

IMPERIALISM, OR THE MISTAKE
ABOUT MAN

THE CHARM OF JINGOISM

I HAVE cast about widely to find a title for this
section ; and I confess that the word " Imperial-
ism " is a clumsy version of my meaning. But
no other word came nearer ; " Militarism "
would have been even more misleading, and
" The Superman " makes nonsense of any dis-
cussion that he enters. Perhaps, upon the
whole, the word " Csesarism " would have been
better ; but I desire a popular word ; and Im-
perialism (as the reader will perceive) does
cover for the most part the men and theories
that I mean to discuss.

This small confusion is increased, however,
by the fact that I do also disbelieve in Im-
perialism in its popular sense, as a mode or
theory of the patriotic sentiment of this coun-
try. But popular Imperialism in England has
very little to do with the sort of Ca?sarean Im-
101

CHARM OF JINGOISM

perialism I wish to sketch. I differ from the
Colonial idealism of Rhodes and Kipling; but
I do not think, as some of its opponents do,
that it is an insolent creation of English harsh-
ness and rapacity. Imperialism, I think, is a
fiction created, not by English hardness, but by
English softness ; nay, in a sense, even by Eng-
lish kindness.

The reasons for believing in Australia are
mostly as sentimental as the most sentimental
reasons for believing in heaven. New South
Wales is quite literally regarded as a place
where the wicked cease from troubling and the
weary are at rest ; that is, a paradise for uncles
who have turned dishonest and for nephews
who are born tired. British Columbia is in
strict sense a fairyland; it is a world where
a magic and irrational luck is supposed to at-
tend the youngest sons. This strange opti-
mism about the ends of the earth is an English
weakness ; but to show that it is not a coldness
or a harshness it is quite sufficient to say that
no one shared it more than that gigantic Eng-
103

CHARM OF JINGOISM

lish sentimentalist — the great Charles Dickens.
The end of " David Copperfield " is unreal not
merely because it is an optimistic ending, but
because it is an Imperialistic ending. The de-
corous British happiness planned out for
David Copperfield and Agnes would be embar-
rassed by the perpetual presence of the hope-
less tragedy of Emily, or the more hopeless
farce of Micawber. Therefore, both Emily
and Micawber are shipped off to a vague colony
where changes come over them with no conceiv-
able cause, except the climate. The tragic
woman becomes contented and the comic man
becomes responsible, solely as the result of a
sea voyage and the first sight of a kangaroo.
To Imperialism in the light political sense,
therefore, my only objection is that it is an
illusion of comfort ; that an Empire whose heart
is failing should be specially proud of the ex-
tremities, is to me no more sublime a fact than
that an old dandy whose brain is gone should
still be proud of his legs. It consoles men for
the evident ugliness and apathy of England
103

CHARM OF JINGOISM

with legends of fair youth and heroic strenuous-
ness in distant continents and islands. A man
can sit amid the squalor of Seven Dials and feel
that life is innocent and godlike in the bush
or on the veldt. Just so a man might sit in
the squalor of Seven Dials and feel that life
was innocent and godlike in Brixton and Surbi-
ton. Brixton and Surbiton are " new " ; they
are expanding ; they are " nearer to nature,"
in the sense that they have eaten up nature mile
by mile. The only objection is the objection
of fact. The young men of Brixton are not
young giants. The lovers of Surbiton are not
all pagan poets, singing with the sweet energy
of the spring. Nor are the people of the Col-
onies when you meet them young giants or
pagan poets. They are mostly Cockneys who
have lost their last music of real things by
getting out of the sound of Bow Bells. Mr.
Rudyard Kipling, a man of real though decad-
ent genius, threw a theoretic glamour over them
which is already fading. Mr. Kipling is,
in a precise and rather startling sense, the ex-
104

CHARM OF JINGOISM

ception that proves the rule. For he has im-
agination, of an oriental and cruel kind, but
he has it, not because he grew up in a new
country, but precisely because he grew up in
the oldest country upon earth. He is rooted
in a past — an Asiatic past. He might never
have written "Kabul River" if he had been
born in Melbourne.

I say frankly, therefore (lest there should
be any air of evasion), that Imperialism in its
common patriotic pretensions appears to me
both weak and perilous. It is the attempt of
a European country to create a kind of sham
Europe which it can dominate, instead of the
real Europe, which it can only share. It is a
love of living with one's inferiors. The notion
of restoring the Roman Empire by oneself and
for oneself is a dream that has haunted every
Christian nation in a different shape and in
almost every shape as a snare. The Spanish
are a consistent and conservative people;
therefore they embodied that attempt at Em-
pire in long and lingering dynasties. The
105

CHARM OF JINGOISM

French are a violent people, and therefore they
twice conquered that Empire by violence of
arms. The English are above all a poetical
and optimistic people; and therefore their Em-
pire is something vague and yet sympathetic,
something distant and yet dear. But this
dream of theirs of being powerful in the utter-
most places, though a native weakness, is still
a weakness in them; much more of a weakness
than gold was to Spain or glory to Napoleon.
If ever we were in collision with our real brothers
and rivals we should leave all this fancy out of
account. We should no more dream of pitting
Australian armies against German than of pit-
ting Tasmanian sculpture against French. I
have thus explained, lest anyone should accuse
me of concealing an unpopular attitude, why
I do not believe in Imperialism as commonly un-
derstood. I think it not merely an occasional
wrong to other peoples, but a continuous feeble-
ness, a running sore, in my own. But it is
also true that I have dwelt on this Imperialism
that is an amiable delusion partly in order to
106

CHARM OF JINGOISM

show how different it is from the deeper, more
sinister and yet more persuasive thing that I
have been forced to call Imperialism for the
convenience of this chapter. In order to get
to the root of this evil and quite un-English
Imperialism we must cast back and begin anew
with a more general discussion of the first needs
of human intercourse.

107

II

WISDOM AND THE WEATHER

IT is admitted, one may hope, that common
things are never commonplace. Birth is cov-
ered with curtains precisely because it is a
staggering and monstrous prodigy. Death
and first love, though they happen to every-
body, can stop one's heart with the very
thought of them. But while this is granted,
something further may be claimed. It is not
merely true that these universal things are
strange ; it is moreover true that they are sub-
tle. In the last analysis most common things-
will be found to be highly complicated. Some
men of science do indeed get over the difficulty
by dealing only with the easy part of it : thus,
they will call first love the instinct of sex, and
the awe of death the instinct of self-preserva-
tion. But this is only getting over the difficulty
of describing peacock green by calling it blue.
There is blue in it. That there is a strong
108

WISDOM AND THE WEATHER

physical element in both romance and the Me-
mento Mori makes them if possible more, baffling
than if they had been wholly intellectual. No
man could say exactly how much his sexuality
was colored by a clean love of beauty, or by
the mere boyish itch for irrevocable adventures,
like running away to sea. No man could say
how far his animal dread of the end was mixed
up with mystical traditions touching morals
and religion. It is exactly because these things
are animal, but not quite animal, that the dance
of all the difficulties begins. The materialists
analyze the easy part, deny the hard part and
go home to their tea.

It is complete error to suppose that because
a thing is vulgar therefore it is not refined;
that is, subtle and hard to define. A drawing-
room song of my youth which began " In the
gloaming, D, my darling," was vulgar enough
as a song; but the connection between human
passion and the twilight is none the less an
exquisite and even inscrutable thing. Or to
take another obvious instance: the jokes about
109

WISDOM AND THE WEATHER

a mother-in-law are scarcely delicate, but the
problem of a mother-in-law is extremely deli-
cate. A mother-in-law is subtle because she
is a thing like the twilight. She is a mystical
blend of two inconsistent things — law and a
mother. The caricatures misrepresent her;
but they arise out of a real human enigma.
" Comic Cuts " deals with the difficulty wrongly,
but it would need George Meredith at his best
to deal with the difficulty rightly. The nearest
statement of the problem perhaps is this: it is
not that a mother-in-law must be nasty, but
that she must be very nice.

But it is best perhaps to take in illustration
some daily custom we have all heard despised
as vulgar or trite. Take, for the sake of argu-
ment, the custom of talking about the weather.
Stevenson calls It " the very nadir and scoff of
good conversationalists." Now there are very
deep reasons for talking about the weather,
reasons that are delicate as well as deep; they
lie in layer upon layer of stratified sagacity.
(First of all it is a gesture of primeval worship.
110

WISDOM AND THE WEATHER

The sky must be invoked; and to begin every-
thing with the weather is a sort of pagan way
of beginning everything with prayer. Jonea
and Brown talk about the weather: but so do
Milton and Shelley. Then it is an expression
of that elementary idea in politeness — equality.
For the very word politeness is only the Greek
for citizenship. The word politeness is akin to
the word policeman; a charming thought.
Properly understood, the citizen should be more
polite than the gentleman ; perhaps the police-
man should be the most courtly and elegant of
the three. But all good manners must obvi-
ously begin with the sharing of something in a
simple style. Two men should share an um-
brella; if they have not got an umbrella, they
should at least share the rain, with all its ricK
potentialities of wit and philosophy. " For He
maketh His sun to shine . . ." This is the
second element in the weather; its recognition
of human equality in that we all have our hats
under the dark blue spangled umbrella of the
universe. Arising out of this is the third
111

WISDOM AND THE WEATHER

wholesome strain in the custom ; I mean that it
begins with the body and with our inevitable
bodily brotherhood. All true friendliness begins
with fire and food and drink and the recogni-
tion of rain or frost. Those who will not begin
at the bodily end of things are already prigs
and may soon be Christian Scientists. Each
human soul has in a sense to enact for itself
the gigantic humility of the Incarnation. Every
man must descend into the flesh to meet man-
kind.

Briefly, in the mere observation " a fine day "
there is the whole great human idea of comrade-
ship. Now, pure comradeship is another of
those broacl and yet bewildering things. We
all enjoy it; yet when we come to talk about
it we almost always talk nonsense, chiefly be-
cause we suppose it to be a simpler affair than
it is. It is simple to conduct ; but it is by no
means simple to analyze. Comradeship is at
the most only one half of human life ; the other
half is Love, a thing so different that one might
fancy it had been made for another universe.
113

WISDOM AND THE WEATHER

And I do not mean mere sex love ; any kind of
concentrated passion, maternal love, or even the
fiercer kinds of friendship are in their nature
alien to pure comradeship. Both sides are es-
sential to life ; and both are known in differing
degrees to everybody of every age or sex. But
very broadly speaking it may still be said that
women stand for the dignity of love and men;
for the dignity of comradeship. I mean that
the institution would hardly be expected if the
males of the tribe did not mor at guard over it.
The affections in which women excel have so
much more authority and intensity that pure
comradeship would be washed away if it were
not rallied and guarded in clubs, corps, col-
leges, banquets and regiments. Most of us
have heard the voice in which the hostess tells
her husband not to sit too long over the cigars.
It is the dreadful voice of Love, seeking to de-
stroy Comradeship.

All true comradeship has in it those three
elements which I have remarked in the ordinary
exclamation about the weather. First, it has
113

WISDOM AND THE WEATHER

a sort of broad philosophy like the common sky,
emphasizing that we are all under the same
cosmic conditions. We are all in the same boat,
the "winged rock" of Mr. Herbert Trench.
Secondly, it recognizes this bond as the essen-
tial one; for comradeship is simply humanity
seen in that one aspect in which men are really
equal. The old writers were entirely wise when
they talked of the equality of men; but they
were also very wise in not mentioning women.
Women are always authoritarian; they are al-
ways above or below; that is why marriage Is
a sort of poetical see-saw. There are only three
things in the world that women do not under-
stand; and they are Liberty, Equality, and
Fraternity. But men '(a class little understood
in the modern world) find these things the breath
of their nostrils ; and our most learned ladies will
not even begin to understand them until they
make allowance for this kind of cool camarade-
rie. Lastly, it contains the third quality t>f the
weather, the insistence upon the body and its
indispensable satisfaction. No one has even

WISDOM AND THE WEATHER

begun to understand comradeship who does not
accept with it a certain hearty eagerness in
eating, drinking, or smoking, an uproarious
materialism which to many women appears only;
hoggish. You may call the thing an orgy or
a sacrament; it is certainly an essential. It is
at root a resistance to the superciliousness of
the individual. Nay, its very swaggering and
howling are humble. In the heart of its rowdi-
ness there is a sort of mad modesty ; a desire to
melt the separate soul into the mass of unpre-
tentious masculinity. It is a clamorous con-
fession of the weakness of all flesh. No man
must be superior to the things that are common
to men. This sort of equality must be bodily
and gross and comic. Not only are we all in
the same boat, but we are all seasick.

The word comradeship just now promises to
become as fatuous as the word " affinity."
There are clubs of a Socialist sort where all
the members, men and women, call each other
" Comrade." I have no serious emotions, hos-
tile or otherwise, about this particular habit : at
115

WISDOM AND THE WEATHER

the worst it is conventionality, and at the best
flirtation. I am convinced here only to point
out a rational principle. If you choose to lump
all flowers together, lilies and dahlias and tu-
lips and chrysanthemums and call them all
daisies, you will find that £ou have spoiled the
very fine word daisy. If you choose to call
every human attachment comradeship, if you
include under that name the respect of a youth
for a venerable prophetess, the interest of a
man in a beautiful woman who baffles him, the
pleasure of a philosophical old fogy in a girl
who is impudent and innocent, the end of the
meanest quarrel or the beginning of the most
mountainous love ; if you are going to call all
these comradeship, you will gain nothing; you
will only lose a word. Daisies are obvious and
universal and open ; but they are only one kind
of flower. Comradeship is obvious and univer-
sal and open ; but it is only one kind of affec-
tion ; it has characteristics that would destroy
any other kind. Anyone who has known true
comradeship in a club or in a regiment, knows
116

WISDOM AND THE WEATHER

that it is impersonal. There is a pedantic
phrase used in debating clubs which is strictly
true to the masculine emotion; they call it
" speaking to the question." Women speak to
each other; men speak to the subject they are
speaking about. Many an honest man has sat
in a ring of his five best friends under heaveri
and forgotten who was in the room while he
explained some system. This is not peculiar to
intellectual men ; men are all theoretical, whether
they are talking about God or about golf. Men
are all impersonal; that is to say, republican.
No one remembers after a really good talk who
has said the good things. Every man speaks
to a visionary multitude ; a mystical cloud, that
is called the club.

It is obvious that this cool and careless qual-
ity which is essential to the collective affection
of males involves disadvantages and dangers.
It leads to spitting; it leads to coarse speech;
it must lead to these things so long as it is
honorable ; comradeship must be in some degree
ugly. The moment beauty is mentioned in male
11T

WISDOM AND THE WEATHER

friendship, the nostrils are stopped with the
smell of abominable things. Friendship must
be physically dirty if it is to be morally clean.
It must be in its shirt sleeves. The chaos of
habits that always goes with males when left
entirely to themselves has only one honorable
cure ; and that is the strict discipline of a mon-
astery. Anyone who has seen our unhappy
young idealists in East End Settlements losing
their collars in the wash and living on tinned
salmon will fully understand why it was decided
by the wisdom of St. Bernard or St. Benedict,
that if men were to live without women, they
must not live without rules. Something of the
same sort of artificial exactitude, of course, is
obtained in an army; and an army also has to
be in many ways monastic; only that it has
celibacy without chastity. But these things do
not apply to normal married men. These have
a quite sufficient restraint on their instinctive
anarchy in the savage common-sense of the
other sex. There is only one very timid sort
of man that is not afraid of women.
118

in

THE COMMON VISION

Now this masculine love of an open and level
camaraderie is the life within all democracies
and attempts to govern by debate; without
it the republic would be a dead formula. Even
as it is, of course, the spirit of democracy fre-
quently differs widely from the letter, and a
pothouse is often a better test than a Parlia-
ment. Democracy in its human sense is not
arbitrament by the majority; it is not even
arbitrament by everybody. It can be more
nearly defined as arbitrament by anybody. I
mean that it rests on that club habit of taking
a total stranger for granted, of assuming cer-
tain things to be inevitably common to your-
self and him. Only the things that anybody
may be presumed to hold have the full author-
ity of democracy. Look out of the window
and notice the first man who walks by. The
119

THE COMMON VISION

Liberals may have swept England with an over-
whelming majority; but you would not stake a
button that the man is a Liberal. The Bible
may be read in all schools and respected in all
law courts ; but you would not bet a straw that
he believes in the Bible. But you would bet
your week's wages, let us say, that he believes
in wearing clothes. You would bet that he be-
lieves that physical courage is a fine thing, or
that parents have authority over children. Of
course, he might be the millionth man who does
not believe these things ; if it comes to that,
he might be the Bearded Lady dressed up as a
man. But these prodigies are quite a different
thing from any mere calculation of numbers.
People who hold these views are not a minority,
but a monstrosity. But of these universal
dogmas that have full democratic authority
the only test is this test of anybody. What
you would observe before any newcomer in a
tavern — that is the real English law. The first
man you see from the window, he is the King
of England.

120

THE COMMON VISION

The decay of taverns, which is but a part of
the general decay of democracy, has undoubt-
edly weakened this masculine spirit of equality.
I remember that a roomful of Socialists liter-
ally laughed when I told them that there were
no two nobler words in all poetry than Public
House. They thought it was a joke. Why
they should think it a joke, since they want to
make all houses public houses, I cannot imag-
ine. But if anyone wishes to see the real rowdy
egalitarianism which is necessary (to males, at
least) he can find it as well as anywhere in
the great old tavern disputes which come down
to us in such books as Boswell's Johnson. It
is worth while to mention that one name espe-
cially because the modern world in its morbidity
has done it a strange injustice. The demeanor
of Johnson, it is said, was " harsh and despotic."
It was occasionally harsh, but it was never
despotic. Johnson was not in the least a des-
pot; Johnson was a demagogue, he shouted
against a shouting crowd. The very fact that
he wrangled with other people is proof that
121

THE COMMON VISION

other people were allowed to wrangle with
him. His very brutality was based on the idea
of an equal scrimmage, like that of football.
It is strictly true that he bawled and banged
the table because he was a modest man. He
was honestly afraid of being overwhelmed or
even overlooked. Addison had exquisite man-
ners and was the king of his company; he was
polite to everybody; but superior to every-
body; therefore he has been handed down for-
ever in the immortal insult of Pope —

" Like Cato, give his little Senate laws
And sit attentive to his own applause."

Johnson, so far from being king of his com-
pany, was a sort of Irish Member in his own
Parliament. Addison was a courteous superior
and was hated. Johnson was an insolent equal
and therefore was loved by all who knew him,
and handed down in a marvelous book, which is
one of the mere miracles of love.

This doctrine of equality is essential to con-

THE COMMON VISION

versation ; so much may be admitted by anyone
who knows what conversation is. Once argu-
ing at a table in a tavern the most famous man
on earth would wish to be obscure, so that his
brilliant remarks might blaze like stars on the
background of his obscurity. To anything
worth calling a man nothing can be conceived
more cold or cheerless than to be king of your
company. But it may be said that in mascu-
line sports and games, other than the great
game of debate, there is definite emulation and
eclipse. There is indeed emulation, but this is
only an ardent sort of equality. Games are
competitive, because that is the only way of
making them exciting. But if anyone doubts
that men must forever return to the ideal of
equality, it is only necessary to answer that
there is such a thing as a handicap. If men
exulted in mere superiority, they would seek
to see how far such superiority could go ; they
would b'e glad when one strong runner came
in miles ahead of all the rest. But what men
like is not the triumph of superiors, but the

THE COMMON VISION

struggle of equals; and, therefore, they intro-
duce even Into their competitive sports an arti-
ficial equality. It is sad to think how few of
those who arrange our sporting handicaps can
be supposed with any probability to realize that
they are abstract and even severe republicans.
No; the real objection to equality and self-
rule has nothing to do with any of these free
and festive aspects of mankind ; all men are
democrats when they are happy. The philo-
sophic opponent of democracy would substan-
tially sum up his position by saying that it
" will not work." Before going further, I
will register in passing a protest against the
assumption that working is the one test of
humanity. Heaven does not work; it plays.
Men are most themselves when they are free;
and if I find that men are snob's in their work
but democrats on their holidays, I shall take
the liberty to believe their holidays. But it
is this question of work which really perplexes
the question of equality; and it is with that
that we must now deal. Perhaps the truth

THE COMMON VISION

can be put most pointedly thus : that democracy
has one real enemy, and that is civilization.
Those utilitarian miracles which science has
made are anti-democratic, not so much in their
perversion, or even in their practical result, as
in their primary shape and purpose. The
Frame-Breaking Rioters were right; not per-
haps in thinking that machines would make
fewer men workmen; but certainly in thinking
that machines would make fewer men masters.
More wheels do mean fewer handles ; fewer han-
dles do mean fewer hands. The machinery of
science must be individualistic and isolated. A
mob can shout round a palace ; but a mob can-
not shout down a telephone. The specialist
appears and democracy is half spoiled at a
stroke.

125

IV

THE INSANE NECESSITY

THE common conception among the dregs of
Darwinian culture is that men have slowly
worked their way out of inequality into a state
of comparative equality. The truth is, I
fancy, almost exactly the opposite. All men
have normally and naturally begun with the
idea of equality; they have only abandoned it
late and reluctantly, and always for some mate-
rial reason of detail. They have never natu-
rally felt that one class of men was superior
to another; they have always been driven to
assume it through certain practical limitations
of space and time.

For example, there is one element which must
always tend to oligarchy — or rather to despot-
ism; I mean the element of hurry. If the
house has caught fire a man must ring up the
fire engines ; a committee cannot ring them up.
126

THE INSANE NECESSITY

If a camp is surprised by night somebody must
give the order to fire; there is no time to vote
it. It is solely a question of the physical limi-
tations of time and space; not at all of any
mental limitations in the mass of men com-
manded. If all the people in the house were
men of destiny it would still be better that
they should not all talk into the telephone at
once; nay, it would be better that the silliest
man of all should speak uninterrupted. If an
army actually consisted of nothing but Hani-
bals and Napoleons, it would still be better in
the case of a surprise that they should not all
give orders together. Nay, it would be better
if the stupidest of them all gave the orders.
Thus, we see that merely military subordina-
tion, so far from resting on the inequality of
men, actually rests on the equality of men.
Discipline does not involve the Carlylean notion
that somebody is always right when everybody
is wrong, and that we must discover and crown
that somebody. On the contrary, discipline
means that in certain frightfully rapid cir-

THE INSANE NECESSITY

cumstances, one can trust anybody so long as
he is not everybody. The military spirit does
Hot mean (as Carlyle fancied) obeying the
strongest and wisest man. On the contrary,
the military spirit means, if anything, obeying
the weakest and stupidest man, obeying him
merely because he is a man, and not a thousand
men. Submission to a weak man is discipline.
Submission to a strong man is only servility.

Now it can be easily shown that the thing
we call aristocracy in Europe is not in its ori-
gin and spirit an aristocracy at all. It is not
a system of spiritual degrees and distinctions
like, for example, the caste system of India,
or even like the old Greek distinction between
free-men and slaves. It is simply the remains
of a military organization, framed partly to
sustain the sinking Roman Empire, partly to
break and avenge the awful onslaught of Islam.
The word Duke simply means Colonel, just as
the word Emperor simply means Commander-
in-Chief. The whole story is told in the single
title of Counts of the Holy Roman Empire,

THE INSANE NECESSITY

which merely means officers in the European
army against the contemporary Yellow Peril.
Now in an army nobody ever dreams of sup-
posing that difference of rank represents a
difference of moral reality. Nobody ever says
about a regiment, "Your Major is very hu-
morous and energetic; your Colonel, of course,
must be even more humorous and yet more
energetic." No one ever says, in reporting a
mess-room conversation, "Lieutenant Jones
was very witty, but was naturally inferior to
Captain Smith." The essence of an army is
the idea of official inequality, founded on un-
official equality. The Colonel is not obeyed
because he is the best man, but because he is
the Colonel. Such was probably the spirit of
the system of dukes and counts when it first
arose out of the military spirit and military
necessities of Rome. With the decline of those
necessities it has gradually ceased to have mean-
ing as a military organization, and become
honeycombed with unclean plutocracy. Even
now it is not a spiritual aristocracy — it is not
129,

THE INSANE NECESSITY

so bad as all that. It is simply an army with-
out an enemy — billeted upon the people.

Man, therefore, has a specialist as well as
comrade-like aspect ; and the case of militar-
ism is not the only case of such specialist sub-
mission. The tinker and tailor, as well as the
soldier and sailor, require a certain rigidity of
rapidity of action : at least, if the tinker is not
organized that is largely why he does not tink
on any large scale. The tinker and tailor often
represent the two nomadic races in Europe:
the Gipsy and the Jew ; but the Jew alone has
influence because he alone accepts some sort of
discipline. Man, we say, has two sides, the
specialist side where he must have subordina-
tion, and the social side where he must have
equality. There is a truth in the saying that
ten tailors go to make a man ; but we must
remember also that ten Poets Laureate or ten
Astronomers Royal go to make a man, too.
Ten million tradesmen go to make Man him-
self; but humanity consists of tradesmen when
they are not talking shop. Now the peculiar
130

THE INSANE NECESSITY

peril of our time, which I call for argument's
sake Imperialism or Caesarism, is the complete
eclipse of comradeship and equality by special-
ism and domination.

There are only two kinds of social structure
conceivable — personal government and imper-
sonal government. If my anarchic friends will
not have rules — they will have rulers. Prefer-
ring personal government, with its tact and
flexibility, is called Royalism. Preferring im-
personal government, with its dogmas and defi-
nitions, is called Republicanism. Objecting
broadmindedly both to kings and creeds is
called Bosh ; at least, I know no more philo-
sophic word for it. You can be guided by the
shrewdness or presence of mind of one ruler,
or by the equality and ascertained justice of
one rule; but you must have one or the other,
or you are not a nation, but a nasty mess.
Now men in their aspect of equality and de-
bate adore the idea of rules ; they develop and
complicate them greatly to excess. A man
finds far more regulations and definitions in
131

THE INSANE NECESSITY

his club, where there are rules, than in his home,
where there is a ruler. A deliberative assem-
bly, the House of Commons, for instance, car-
ries this mummery to the point of a methodical
madness. The whole system is stiff with rigid
unreason; like the Royal Court in Lewis Car-
roll. You would think the Speaker would
speak; therefore he is mostly silent. You
would think a man would take off his hat to
stop and put it on to go away; therefore he
takes off his hat to walk out and puts it on
to stop in. Names are forbidden, and a man
must call his own father "my right honorable
friend the member for West Birmingham."
These are, perhaps, fantasies of decay: but
fundamentally they answer a masculine appe-
tite. Men feel that rules, even if irrational,
are universal; men feel that law is equal, even
when it is not equitable. There is a wild fair-
ness in the thing — as there is in tossing up.

Again, it is gravely unfortunate that when
critics ido attack such cases as the Commons it
is always on the points (perhaps the few

THE INSANE NECESSITY

points) where the Commons are right. They
denounce the House as the Talking-Shop, and
complain that it wastes time in wordy mazes.
Now this is just one respect in which the Com-
mons are actually like the Common People.
If they love leisure and long debate, it is be-
cause all men love it ; that they really represent
England. There the Parliament does approach
to the virile virtues of the pothouse.

The real truth is that adumbrated in the
introductory section, when we spoke of the
sense of home and property, as now we speak
of the sense of counsel and community. All
men do naturally love the idea of leisure, laugh-
ter, loud and equal argument ; but there stands
a specter in our hall. We are conscious of the
towering modern challenge that is called spe-
cialism or cut- throat competition — Business.
Business will have nothing to do with leisure;
business will have no truck with comradeship;
business will pretend to no patience with all
the legal fictions and fantastic handicaps by
which comradeship protects its egalitarian
133

THE INSANE NECESSITY

ideal. The modern millionaire, when engaged
in the agreeable and typical task of sacking
his own father, will certainly not refer to him as
the right honorable clerk from the Laburnum
Road, Brixton. Therefore there has arisen
in modern life a literary fashion devoting itself
to the romance of business, to great demigods
of greed and to fairyland of finance. This
popular philosophy is utterly despotic and
anti-democratic; this fashion is the flower of
that Caesarism against which I am concerned to
protest. The ideal millionaire is strong in the
possession of a brain of steel. The fact that
the real millionaire is rather more often strong
in the possession of a head of wood, does not
alter the spirit and trend of the idolatry. The
essential argument is " Specialists must be des-
pots ; men must be specialists. You cannot
have equality in a soap factory ; so you cannot
have it anywhere. You cannot have comrade-
ship in a wheat corner ; so you cannot have it at
all. We must have commercial civilization;
therefore we must destroy democracy." I know
134

THE INSANE NECESSITY

that plutocrats have seldom sufficient fancy to
soar to such examples as soap or wheat. They
generally confine themselves, with fine freshness
of mind, to a comparison between the state and
a ship. One anti-democratic writer remarked
that he would not like to sail in a vessel in which
the cabin-boy had an equal vote with the cap-
tain. It might easily be urged in answer that
many a ship (the Victoria, for instance) was
sunk because an admiral gave an order which
a cabin-boy could see was wrong. But this
is a debating reply; the essential fallacy is
both deeper and simpler. The elementary fact
is that we were all born in a state; we were
not all born on a ship ; like some of our great
British bankers. A ship still remains a spe-
cialist experiment, like a diving-bell or a flying
ship: in such peculiar perils the need for
promptitude constitutes the need for autocracy.
But we live and die in the vessel of the state;
and if we cannot find freedom, camaraderie
and the popular element in the state, we can-
not find it at all. And the modern doctrine of
135

THE INSANE NECESSITY

commercial despotism means that we shall not
find it at all. Our specialist trades in their
highly civilized state cannot (it says) be run
without the whole brutal business of bossing
and sacking, " too old at forty " and all the
rest of the filth. And they; must be run, and
therefore we call on Csesar. Nobody but the
Superman could descend to do such dirty work.
Now (to reiterate my title) this is what is
wrong. This is the huge modern heresy of
altering the human soul to fit its conditions,
instead of altering human conditions to fit the
human soul. If soap-boiling is really incon-
sistent with brotherhood, so much the worst
for soap-boiling, not for brotherhood. If civ-
ilization really cannot get on with democracy,
so much the worse for civilization, not for
democracy. Certainly, it would be far better
to go back to village communes, if they really
are communes. Certainly, it would be better
to do without soap rather than to do without
society. Certainly, we would sacrifice all our
wires, wheels, systems, specialties, physical
136

THE INSANE NECESSITY

science and frenzied finance for one half-hour
of happiness such as has often come to us with
comrades in a common tavern. I do not say
the sacrifice will be necessary; I only say it
will be easy.

137

PART m

FEMINISM, OR THE MISTAKE ABOUT
WOMAN

THE UNMILITARY SUFFRAGETTE

IT will be better to adopt in this chapter the
same process that appeared a piece of mental
justice in the last. My general opinions on
the feminine question are such as many suffra-
gists would warmly approve ; and it would be
easy to state them without any open reference
to the current controversy. But just as it
seemed more decent to say first that I was not
in favor of Imperialism even in its practical
and popular sense, so it seems more decent to
say the same of Female Suffrage, in its prac-
tical and popular sense. In other words, it Is
only fair to state, however hurriedly, the super-
ficial objection to the Suffragettes before we
go on to the really subtle questions behind the
Suffrage.

Well, to get this honest but unpleasant busi-
ness over, the objection to the Suffragettes is
not that they are Militant Suffragettes. On
Ml

THE SUFFRAGETTE

the contrary, it is that they are not militant
enough. A revolution is a military thing; it
has all the military virtues ; one of which is
that it comes to an end. Two parties fight
with deadly weapons, but under certain rules
of arbitrary honor; the party that wins be-
comes the government and proceeds to govern.
The aim of civil war, like the aim of all war, is
peace. Now the Suffragettes cannot raise civil
war in this soldierly and decisive sense; first,
because they are women ; and, secondly, because
they are very few women. But they can raise
something else ; which is altogether another pair
of shoes. They do not create revolution ;
what they do create is anarchy ; and the differ-
ence between these is not a question of violence,
but a question of fruitfulness and finality.
Revolution of its nature produces government ;
anarchy only produces more anarchy. Men
may have what opinions they please about the
beheading of King Charles or King Louis, but
they cannot deny that Bradshaw and Crom-
well ruled, that Carnot and Napoleon governed.

THE SUFFRAGETTE

Someone conquered; something occurred. You
can only knock off the King's head once. But
you can knock off the King's hat any number
of times. Destruction is finite; obstruction is
infinite: so long as rebellion takes the form of
mere disorder (instead of an attempt to en-
force a new order) there is no logical end to it ;
it can feed on itself and renew itself forever.
If Napoleon had not wanted to be a Consul,
but only wanted to be a nuisance, he could, pos-
sibly, have prevented any government arising
successfully out of the Revolution. But such
a proceeding would not have deserved the dig-
nified name of rebellion.

It is exactly this unmilitant quality in the
Suffragettes that makes their superficial prob-
lem. The problem is that their action has
none of the advantages of ultimate violence;
it does not afford a test. War is a dreadful
thing; but it does prove two points sharply
and unanswerably — numbers, and an unnatural
valor. One does discover the two urgent mat-
ters; how many rebels there are alive, and
143

THE SUFFRAGETTE

how many are ready to be dead. But a tiny
minority, even an interested minority, may
maintain mere disorder forever. There is also,
of course, in the case of these women, the fur-
ther falsity that is introduced by their sex. It
is false to state the matter as a mere brutal
question of strength. If his muscles give a
man a vote, then his horse ought to have two
votes and his elephant five votes. The truth
is more subtle than that ; it is that bodily out-
break is a man's instinctive weapon, like the
hoofs to the horse or the tusks to the elephant.
All riot is a threat of war; but the woman is
brandishing a weapon she can never use. There
are many weapons that she could and does use.
If (for example) all the women nagged for a
vote they would get it in a month. But there
again, one must remember, it would be neces-
sary to get all the women to nag. And that
brings us to the end of the political surface of
the matter. The working objection to the
Suffragette philosophy is simply that over-
mastering millions of women do not agree with
144

THE SUFFRAGETTE

it. I am aware that some maintain that
women ought to have votes whether the major-
ity wants them or not; but this is surely a
strange and childish case of setting up formal
democracy to the destruction of actual
democracy. What should the mass of women
decide if they do not decide their general place
in the State? These people practically say
that females may vote about everything except
about Female Suffrage.

But having again cleared my conscience of
my merely political and possibly unpopular
opinion, I will again cast back and try to treat
the matter in a slower and more sympathetic
style; attempt to trace the real roots of
woman's position in the western state, and the
causes of our existing traditions or perhaps
prejudices upon the point. And for this pur-
pose it is again necessary to travel far from
the modern topic, the mere Suffragette of to-
day, and to go back to subjects which, though
much more old, are, I think, considerably more
fresh.

145

II

THE UNIVERSAL STICK

CAST jour eye round the room in which you sit,
and select some three or four things that have
been with man almost since his beginning;
which at least we hear of early in the centuries
and often among the tribes. Let me suppose
that you see a knife on the table, a stick in the
corner, or a fire on the hearth. About each
of these you will notice one specialty ; that not
one of them is special. Each of these ances-
tral things is a universal thing ; made to supply
many different needs; and while tottering
pedants nose about to find the cause and origin
of some old custom, the truth is that it had
fifty causes or a hundred origins. The knife
is meant to cut wood, to cut cheese, to cut pen-
cils, to cut throats ; for a myriad ingenious
or innocent human objects. The stick is meant
partly to hold a man up, partly to knock a man
146

THE UNIVERSAL STICK

down ; partly to point with like a finger-post,
partly to balance with like a balancing pole,
partly to trifle with like a cigarette, partly to
kill with like a club of a giant ; it is a crutch
and a cudgel ; an elongated finger and an extra
leg. The case is the same, of course, with the
fire; about which the strangest modern views
have arisen. A queer fancy seems to be current
that a fire exists to warm people. It exists to
warm people, to light their darkness, to raise
their spirits, to toast their muffins, to air their
rooms, to cook their chestnuts, to tell stories
to their children, to make checkered shadows
on their walls, to boil their hurried kettles, and
to be the red heart of a man's house and that
hearth for which, as the great heathens said,
a man should die.

Now it is the great mark of our modernity
that people are always proposing substitutes
for these old things; and these substitutes al-
ways answer one purpose where the old thing
answered ten. The modern man will wave a
cigarette instead of a stick ; he will cut his pen-
147

THE UNIVERSAL STICK

cil with a little screwing pencil-sharpener in-
stead of a knife ; and he will even boldly offer to
be warmed by hot water pipes instead of a
fire. I have my doubts about pencil-sharpeners
even for sharpening pencils ; and about hot
water pipes even for heat. But when we think
of all those other requirements that these in-
stitutions answered, there opens before us the
whole horrible harlequinade of our civilization.
We see as in a vision a world where a man
tries to cut his throat with a pencil-sharpener;
where a man must learn single-stick with a
cigarette ; where a man must try to toast muf-
fins at electric lamps, and see red and golden
castles in the surface of hot water pipes.

The principle of which I speak can be seen
everywhere in a comparison between the ancient
and universal things and the modern and spe-
cialist things. The object of a theodolite is to
lie level; the object of a stick is to swing loose
at any angle; to whirl like the very wheel of
liberty. The object of a lancet is to lance;
when used for slashing, gashing, ripping, lop-
148

THE UNIVERSAL STICK

ping off heads and limbs, it is a disappointing
instrument. The object of an electric light is
merely to light (a despicable modesty) ; and the
object of an asbestos stove ... I won-
der what is the object of an asbestos stove?
If a man found a coil of rope in a desert he
could at least think of all the things that can
be done with a coil of rope; and some of them
might even be practical. He could tow a boat
or lasso a horse. He could play cat's-cradle,
or pick oakum. He could construct a rope-
ladder for an eloping heiress, or cord her boxes
for a traveling maiden aunt. He could learn
to tie a bow, or he could hang himself. Far
otherwise with the unfortunate traveler who
should find a telephone in the desert. You can
telephone with a telephone ; you cannot do any-
thing else with it. And though this is one of
the wildest joys of life, it falls by one degree
from its full delirium when there is nobody to
answer you. The contention is, in brief, that
you must pull up a hundred roots, and not one,
before you uproot any of these hoary and sim-
149

THE UNIVERSAL STICK

pie expedients. It is only with great difficulty
that a modern scientific sociologist can be got
to see that any old method has a leg to stand
on. But almost every old method has four
or five legs to stand on. Almost all the old
institutions are quadrupeds ; and some of them
are centipedes.

Consider these cases, old and new, and you
will observe the operation of a general tendency.
Everywhere there was one big thing that served
six purposes ; everywhere now there are six
small things ; or, rather (and there is the trou-
ble), there are just five and a half. Neverthe-
less, we will not say that this separation and
specialism is entirely useless or inexcusable. I
have often thanked God for the telephone; I
may any day thank God for the lancet ; and
there is none of these brilliant and narrow in-
ventions (except, of course, the asbestos stove)
which might not be at some moment necessary
and lovely. But I do not think the most aus-
tere upholder of specialism will deny that there
is in these old, many-sided institutions an ele-
150

THE UNIVERSAL STICK

ment of unity and universality which may well
be preserved in its due proportion and place.
Spiritually, at least, it will be admitted that
some all-round balance is needed to equalize
the extravagance of experts. It would not be
difficult to carry the parable of the knife and
stick into higher regions. Religion, the im-
mortal maiden, has been a maid-of-all-work as
well as a servant of mankind. She provided
men at once with the theoretic laws of an unal-
terable cosmos; and also with the practical
rules of the rapid and thrilling game of moral-
ity. She taught logic to the student and told
fairy tales to the children ; it was her business
to confront the nameless gods whose fears are
on all flesh, and also to see the streets were
spotted with silver and scarlet, that there was
a day for wearing ribbons or an hour for ring-
ing bells. The large uses of religion have been
broken up into lesser specialties, just as the
uses of the hearth have been broken up into
hot water pipes and electric bulbs. The ro-
mance of ritual and colored emblem has been
151

THE UNIVERSAL STICK

taken over by that narrowest of all trades,
modern art (the sort called art for art's sake),
and men are in modern practice informed that
they may use all symbols so long as they mean
nothing by them. The romance of conscience
has been dried up into the science of ethics;
which may well be called decency for decency's
sake, decency unborn of cosmic energies and
barren of artistic flower. The cry to the dim
gods, cut off from ethics and cosmology, has
become mere Psychical Research. Everything
has been sundered from everything else, and
everything has grown cold. Soon we shall hear
of specialists dividing the tune from the words
of a song, on the ground that they spoil each
other; and I did once meet a man who openly
advocated the separation of almonds and
raisins. This world is all one wild divorce
court; nevertheless, there are many who still
hear in their souls the thunder of the author-
ity of human habit; those whom Man hath
joined let no man sunder.

This book must avoid religion, but there

THE UNIVERSAL STICK

must (I say) be many, religious and irreligious,
who will concede that this power of answering
many purposes was a sort of strength which
should not wholly die out of our lives. As a
part of personal character, even the moderns
will agree that many-sidedness is a merit and a
merit that may easily be overlooked. This bal-
ance and universality has been the vision of
many groups of men in many ages. It was the
Liberal Education of Aristotle; the jack-of-all-
trades artistry of Leonardo da Vinci and his
friends ; the august amateurishness of the Cava-
lier Person of Quality like Sir William Temple
or the great Earl of Dorset. It has appeared
in literature in our time in the most erratic and
opposite shapes, set to almost inaudible music
by Walter Pater and enunciated through a fog-
horn by Walt Whitman. But the great mass
of men have always been unable to achieve this
literal universality, because of the nature of
their work in the world. Not, let it be noted,
because of the existence of their work. Leon-
ardo da Vinci must have worked pretty hard;
158

THE UNIVERSAL STICK

on the other hand, many a government office
cleric, village constable or elusive plumber may
do (to all human appearance) no work at all,
and yet show no signs of the Aristotelian uni-
versalism. Wha\t makes it difficult for the
average man to be a universalist is that the
average man has to be a specialist; he has not
only to learn one trade, but to learn it so well
as to uphold him in a more or less ruthless
society. This is generally true of males from
the first hunter to the last electrical engineer;
each has not merely to act, but to excel. Nim-
rod has not only to be a mighty hunter before
the Lord, but also a mighty hunter before the
other hunters. The electrical engineer has to
be a very electrical engineer, or he is out-
stripped by engineers yet more electrical.
Those very miracles of the human mind on
which the modern world prides itself, and
rightly in the main, would be impossible without
a certain concentration which disturbs the pure
balance of reason more than does religious
bigotry. No creed can be so limiting as that
154

THE UNIVERSAL STICK

awful adjuration that the cobbler must not go
beyond his last. So the largest and wildest
shots of our world are but in one direction and
with a defined trajectory: the gunner cannot
go beyond his shot, and his shot so often falls
short ; the astronomer cannot go beyond his
telescope, and his telescope goes such a little
way. All these are like men who have stood
on the high peak of a mountain and seen the
horizon like a single ring and who then descend
down different paths towards different towns,
traveling slow or fast. It is right ; there must
be people traveling to different towns ; there
must be specialists ; but shall no one behold the
horizon ? Shall all mankind be specialist surgeons
or peculiar plumbers; shall all humanity be
monomaniac? Tradition has decided that only
half of humanity shall be monomaniac. It has
decided that in every home there shall be a
tradesman and a Jack-of-all-trades. But it
has also decided, among other things, that the
Jack-of-all-trades shall be a Gill-of-all-trades.
It has decided, rightly or wrongly, that this
155

THE UNIVERSAL STICK

specialism and this universalism shall be di-
vided between the sexes. Cleverness shall be
left for men and wisdom for women. For clev-
erness kills wisdom; that is one of the few sad
and certain things.

But for women this ideal of comprehensive
capacity (or common-sense) must long ago
have been washed away. It must have melted
in the frightful furnaces of ambition and eager
technicality. . A man must be partly a one-
idead man, because he is a one-weaponed man —
and he is flung naked into the fight. The
world's demand comes to him direct ; to his wife
indirectly. In short, he must (as the books
on Success say) give "his best"; and what a
small part of a man " his best " is ! His sec-
ond and third best are often much better. If
he is the first violin he must fiddle for life; he
must not remember that he is a fine fourth bag-
pipe, a fair fifteenth billiard-cue, a foil, a foun-
tain-pen, a hand at whist, a gun, and an image
of God.

156

ni

THE EMANCIPATION OF
DOMESTICITY

AND it should be remarked in passing that this
force upon a man to develop one feature has
nothing to do with what is commonly called
our competitive system, but would equally exist
under any rationally conceivable kind of Col-
lectivism. Unless the Socialists are frankly
ready for a fall in the standard of violins, tele-
scopes and electric lights, they must somehow
create a moral demand on the individual that
he shall keep up his present concentration on
these things. It was only by men being in
some degree specialist that there ever were any
telescopes; they must certainly be in some de-
gree specialist in order to keep them going.
It is not by making a man a State wage-earner
that you can prevent him thinking principally
about the very difficult way he earns his wages.
157

THE EMANCIPATION

There is only one way to preserve in the world
that high levity and that more leisurely outlook
which fulfills the old vision of universalism.
That is, to permit the existence of a partly
protected half of humanity ; a half which the
harassing industrial demand troubles indeed,
but only troubles indirectly. In other words,
there must be in every center of humanity one
human being upon a larger plan ; one who does
not " give her best," but gives her all.

Our old analogy of the fire remains the most
workable one. The fire need not blaze like
electricity nor boil like boiling water; its point
is that it blazes more than water and warms
more than light. The wife is like the fire, or
to put things in their proper proportion, the
fire is like the wife. Like the fire, the woman is
expected to cook: not to excel in cooking, but
to cook; to cook better than her husband who
is earning the coke by lecturing on botany or
breaking stones. Like the fire, the woman is
expected to tell tales to the children, not origi-
nal and artistic tales, but tales — better tales
158

THE EMANCIPATION

than would probably be told by a first-class
cook. Like the fire, the woman is expected to
illuminate and ventilate, not by the most star-
tling revelations or the wildest winds of
thought, but better than a man can do it after
breaking stones or lecturing. But she cannot
be expected to endure anything like this uni-
versal duty if she is also to endure the direct
cruelty of competitive or bureaucratic toil.
Woman must be a cook, but not a competitive
cook; a schoolmistress, but not a competitive
schoolmistress; a house-decorator, but not a
competitive house-decorator; a dressmaker, but
not a competitive dressmaker. She should
have not one trade but twenty hobbies; she,
unlike the man, may develop all her second
bests. This is what has been really aimed
at from the first in what is called the seclusion,
or even the oppression, of women. Women
were not kept at home in order to keep them
narrow; on the contrary, they were kept at
home in order to keep them broad. The world
outside the home was one mass of narrowness,
159

THE EMANCIPATION

a maze of cramped paths, a madhouse of mono-
maniacs. It was only by partly limiting and
protecting the woman that she was enabled to
play at five or six professions and so come al-
most as near to God as the child when he plays
at a hundred trades. But the woman's pro-
fessions, unlike the child's, were all truly and
almost terribly fruitful; so tragically real that
nothing but her universality and balance pre-
vented them being merely morbid. This is the
substance of the contention I offer about the
historic female position. I do not deny that
women have been wronged and even tortured;
but I doubt if they were ever tortured so much
as they are tortured now by the absurd modern
attempt to make them domestic empresses and
competitive clerks at the same time. I do not
cleny that even under the old tradition women
had a harder time than men ; that is why we
take off our hats. I do not deny that all these
various female functions were exasperating:;
but I say that there was some aim and meaning
in keeping them various. I do not pause even
160

THE EMANCIPATION

to deny that woman was a servant ; but at least
she was a general servant.

The shortest way of summarizing the posi-
tion is to say that woman stands for the idea
of Sanity; that intellectual home to which the
mind must return after every excursion on ex-
travagance. The mind that finds its way to
wild places is the poet's; but the mind that
never finds its way back is the lunatic's. There
must in every machine be a part that moves
and a part that stands still; there must be in
everything that changes a part that is un-
changeable. And many of the phenomena
which moderns hastily condemn are really parts
of this position of the woman as the center and
pillar of health. Much of what is called her
subservience, and even her pliability, is merely
the subservience and pliability of a universal
remedy; she varies as medicines vary, with the
disease. She has to be an optimist to the mor-
bid husband, a salutary pessimist to the happy-
go-lucky husband. She has to prevent the
Quixote from being put upon, and the bully
161

THE EMANCIPATION

from putting upon others. The French King
wrote —

"Tou jours femme varie
Bien fol qui s'y fie,"

but the truth is that woman always varies, an'd
that is exactly why we always trust her. To
correct every adventure and extravagance with
its antidote in common-sense is not (as the
moderns seem to think) to be in the position of
a spy or a slave. It is to be in the position
of Aristotle or (at the lowest) Herbert Spencer,
to be a universal morality, a complete system
of thought. The slave flatters ; the complete
moralist rebukes. It is, in short, to be a Trim-
mer in the true sense of that honorable term;
which for some reason or other is always used
in a sense exactly opposite to its own. It
seems really to be supposed that a Trimmer
means a cowardly person who always goes over
to the stronger side. It really means a highly
chivalrous person who always goes over to the
weaker side ; like one who trims a boat by sit-

THE EMANCIPATION

ting where there are few people seated. Woman
is a trimmer; and it is a generous, dangerous
and romantic trade.

The final fact which fixes this is a sufficiently
plain one. Supposing it to be conceded that
humanity has acted at least not unnaturally in
dividing itself into two halves, respectively
typifying the ideals of special talent and of
general sanity (since they are genuinely diffi-
cult to combine completely in one mind), it is
not difficult to see why the line of cleavage
has followed the line of sex, or why the female
became the emblem of the universal and the
male of the special and superior. Two gigantic
facts of nature fixed it thus: first, that the
woman who frequently fulfilled her functions
literally could not be specially prominent in
experiment and adventure ; and second, that the
same natural operation surrounded her with
very young children, who require to be taught
not so much anything as everything. Babies
need not to be taught a trade, but to be intro-
duced to a world. To put the matter shortly,
163

THE EMANCIPATION

woman is generally shut up in a house with a
human being at the time when he asks all the
questions that there are, and some that there
aren't. It would be odd if she retained any of
the narrowness of a specialist. Now if anyone
says that this duty of general enlightenment
(even when freed from modern rules and hours,
and exercised more spontaneously by a more
protected person) is in itself too exacting and
oppressive, I can understand the view. I can
only answer that our race has thought it worth
while to cast this burden on women in order to
keep common-sense in the world. But when
people begin to talk about this domestic duty
as not merely difficult but trivial and dreary,
I simply give up the question. For I cannot
with the utmost energy of imagination con-
ceive what they mean. When domesticity, for
instance, is called drudgery, all the difficulty
arises from a double meaning in the word. If
drudgery only means dreadfully hard work, I
admit the woman drudges in the home, as a
man might drudge at the Cathedral of Amiens
164

THE EMANCIPATION

or drudge behind a gun at Trafalgar. But if
it means that the hard work is more heavy
because it is trifling, colorless and of small im-
port to the soul, then as I say, I give it up ; I
do not know what the words mean. To be
Queen Elizabeth within a definite area, decid-
ing sales, banquets, labors and holidays ; to be
Whiteley within a certain area, providing toys,
boots, sheets, cakes, and books, to be Aristotle
within a certain area, teaching morals, man-
ners, theology, and hygiene; I can understand
how this might exhaust the mind, but I cannot
imagine how it could narrow it. How can it
be a large career to tell other people's children
about the Rule of Three, and a small career to
tell one's own children about the universe?
How can it be broad to be the same thing to
everyone, and narrow to be everything to some-
one? No; a woman's function is laborious,
but because it is gigantic, not because it is
minute. I will pity Mrs. Jones for the huge-
ness of her task; I will never pity her for its
smallness.

165

THE EMANCIPATION

But though the essential of the woman's
task is universality, this does not, of course,
prevent her from having one or two severe
though largely wholesome prejudices. She has,
on the whole, been more conscious than man
that she is only one half of humanity ; but she
has expressed it (if one may say so of a lady)
by getting her teeth into the two or three
things which she thinks she stands for. I
would observe here in parenthesis that much of
the recent official trouble about women has
arisen from the fact that they transfer to
things of doubt and reason that sacred stub-
bornness only proper to the primary things
which a woman was set to guard. One's own
children, one's own altar, ought to be a matter
of principle — or if you like, a matter of preju-
dice. On the other hand, who wrote Junius's
Letters ought not to be a principle or a preju-
dice, it ought to be a matter of free and almost
indifferent inquiry. But make an energetic
modern girl secretary to a league to show that
George III. wrote Junius, and in three months
166

THE EMANCIPATION

she will believe it, too, out of mere loyalty to
her employers. Modern women defend their
office with all the fierceness of dlomesticity.
They fight for desk and typewriter as for
hearth and home, and develop a sort of wolfish
wifehood on behalf of the invisible head of the
firm. That is why they do office work so well ;
and that is why they ought not to do it.

167

IV

THE ROMANCE OF THRIFT

THE larger part of womankind, however, have
had to fight for things slightly more intoxicat-
ing to the eye than the desk or the typewriter ;
and it cannot be denied that in defending these,
women have developed the quality called preju-
dice to a powerful and even menacing degree.
But these prejudices will always be found to
fortify the main position of the woman, that
she is to remain a general overseer, an autocrat
within small compass but on all sides. On the
one or two points on which she really misun-
derstands the man's position, it is almost en-
tirely in order to preserve her own. The two
points on which w.oman, actually and of her-
self, is most tenacious may be roughly sum-
marized as the ideal of thrift and the ideal of
dignity.

.Unfortunately for this book it is written by
168

ROMANCE OF THRIFT

a male, and these two qualities, if not hateful
to a man, are at least hateful in a man. But
if we are to settle the sex question at all fairly,
all males must make an imaginative attempt to
enter into the attitude of all good women to-
ward these two things. The difficulty exists
especially, perhaps, in the thing called thrift ;
we men have so much encouraged each other
in throwing money right and left, that there
has come at last to be a sort of chivalrous and
poetical air about losing sixpence. But on a
broader and more candid consideration the case
scarcely stands so.

Thrift is the really romantic thing; economy
is more romantic than extravagance. Heaven
knows I for one speak disinterestedly in the
matter ; for I cannot clearly remember saving
a half-penny ever since I was born. But the
thing is true ; economy, properly understood, is
the more poetic. Thrift is poetic because it is
creative; waste is unpoetic because it is waste.
It is prosaic to throw money away, because it
is prosaic to throw anything away ; it is nega-

ROMANCE OF THRIFT

tive; it is a confession of indifference, that is,
it is a confession of failure. The most prosaic
thing about the house is the dustbin, and the
one great objection to the new fastidious and
aesthetic homestead is simply that in such a
moral menage the dustbin must be bigger than
the house. If a man could undertake to make
use of all things in his . dustbin he would be
a broader genius than Shakespeare. When
science began to use by-products ; when science
found that colors could be made out of coal-
tar, she made her greatest and perhaps her
only claim on the real respect of the human
soul. Now the aim of the good woman is to
use the by-products, or, in other words, to rum-
mage in the dustbin.

A man can only fully comprehend it if he
thinks of some sudden joke or expedient got
up with such materials as may be found in a
private house on a rainy day. A man's defi-
nite daily work is generally run with such rigid
convenience of modern science that thrift, the
j>icking up of potential helps here and there,
170

ROMANCE OF THRIFT

has almost become unmeaning to him. He
comes across it most (as I say) when he is
playing some game within four walls ; when in
charades, a hearthrug will just do for a fur
coat, or a tea-cozy just do for a cocked hat;
when a toy theater needs timber and cardboard,
and the house has just enough firewood and
just enough bandboxes. This is the man's oc-
casional glimpse and pleasing parody of thrift.
But many a good housekeeper plays the same
game every day with ends of cheese and scraps
of silk, not because she is mean, but on the
contrary, because she is magnanimous ; because
she wishes her creative mercy to be over all her
works, that not one sardine should be destroyed,
or cast as rubbish to the void, when she has
made the pile complete.

The modern world must somehow be made
to understand (in theology and other things)
that a view may be vast, broad, universal, lib-
eral and yet come into conflict with another
view that is vast, broad, universal and liberal
also. There is never a war between two sects,
171'

ROMANCE OF THRIFT

but only between two universal Catholic
Churches. The only possible collision is the
collision of one cosmos with another. So in
a smaller way it must be first made clear that
this female economic ideal is a part of that
female variety of outlook and all-round art of
life which we have already attributed to the
sex : thrift is not a small or timid or provincial
thing; it is part of that great idea of the
woman watching on all sides out of all the
windows of the soul and being answerable for
everything. For in the average human house
there is one hole by which money comes in and
a hundred by which it goes out ; man has to do
with the one hole, woman with the hundred.
But though the very stinginess of a woman is
a part of her spiritual breadth, it is none the
less true that it brings her into conflict with
the special kind of spiritual breadth that be-
longs to the males of the tribe. It brings her
into conflict with that shapeless cataract of
Comradeship, of chaotic feasting and deafen-
ing debate, which we noted in the last section.
172

ROMANCE OF THRIFT

The very touch of the eternal in the two sexual
tastes brings them the more into antagonism;
for one stands for a universal vigilance and
the other for an almost infinite output. Partly
through the nature of his moral weakness, and
partly through the nature of his physical
strength, the male is normally prone to ex-
pand things into a sort of eternity ; he always
thinks of a dinner party as lasting all night;
and he always thinks of a night as lasting for-
ever. When the working women in the poor
districts come to the doors of the public houses
and try to get their husbands home, simple-
minded " social workers " always imagine that
every husband is a tragic drunkard and every
wife a broken-hearted saint. It never occurs
to them that the poor woman is only doing
under coarser conventions exactly what every
fashionable hostess does when she tries to get
the men from arguing over the cigars to come
and gossip over the teacups. These women
are not exasperated merely at the amount of
money that is wasted in beer; they are exas-
173

ROMANCE OF THRIFT

perated also at the amount of time that is
wasted in talk. It Is not merely what goeth
into the mouth but what cometh out of the
mouth that, in their opinion, defileth a man.
They will raise against an argument (like their
sisters of all ranks) the ridiculous objection
that nobody is convinced by it; as if a man
wanted to make a body-slave of anybody with
whom he had played single-stick. But the
real female prejudice on this point is not with-
out a basis ; the real feeling is this, that the
most masculine pleasures have a quality of the
ephemeral. A duchess may ruin a duke for
a diamond necklace; but there is the necklace.
rA coster may ruin his wife for a pot of beer;
and where is the beer? The duchess quarrels
with another duchess in order to crush her, to
produce a result; the coster does not argue
with another coster in order to convince him,
but in order to enjoy at once the sound of
his own voice, the clearness of his own opinions
and the sense of masculine society. There is
this element of a fine fruitlessness about the
174.

ROMANCE OF THRIFT

male enjoyments; wine is poured into a bottom-
less bucket; thought plunges into a bottomless
abyss. All this has set woman against the
Public House — that is, against the Parliament
House. She is there to prevent waste; and
the "pub" and the parliament are the very
palaces of waste. In the upper classes the
" pub " is called the club, but that makes no
more difference to the reason than it does to
the rhyme. High and low, the woman's ob-
jection to the Public House is perfectly definite
and rational ; it is that the Public House wastes
the energies that could be used on the private
house.

'As it is about feminine thrift against mascu-
line waste, so it is about feminine dignity
against masculine rowdiness. The woman has
a fixed and very well-founded idea that if she
does not insist on good manners nobody else
will. Babies are not always strong on the point
of dignity, and grown-up men are quite unpre-
sentable. It is true that there are many very po-
lite men, but none that I ever heard of who were
175

ROMANCE OF THRIFT

not either fascinating women or obeying them.
But indeed the female ideal of dignity, like the
female ideal of thrift, lies deeper and may
easily be misunderstood. It rests ultimately
on a strong idea of spiritual isolation ; the
same that makes women religious. They do not
like being melted down; they dislike and avoid
the mob. That anonymous quality we have re-
marked in the club conversation would be com-
mon impertinence in a case of ladies. I
remember an artistic and eager lady asking
me in her grand green drawing-room whether I
believed in comradeship between the sexes, and
why not. I was driven back on offering the ob-
vious and sincere answer " Because if I were to
treat you for two minutes like a comrade you
would turn me out of the house." The only
certain rule on this subject is always to deal
with woman and never with women. " Women "
is a profligate word ; I have used it repeatedly
in this chapter ; but it always has a blackguard
sound. It smells of oriental cynicism and he-
donism. Every woman is a captive queen.
176

ROMANCE OF THRIFT

But every crowd of women is only a harem
broken loose.

I am not expressing my own views here, but
those of nearly all the women I have known.
It is quite unfair to say that a woman hates
other women individually ; but I think it would
be quite true to say that she detests them in
a confused heap. And this is not because she
despises her own sex, but because she respects
it; and respects especially that sanctity and
separation of each item which is represented
in manners by the idea of dignity and In morals
by the idea of chastity.

177

THE COLDNESS OF CHLOE

WE hear much of the human error which ac-
cepts what is sham as what is real. But it is
worth while to remember that with unfamiliar
things we often mistake what is real for what
is sham. It is true that a very young man may
think the wig of an actress is her hair. But it
is equally true that a child yet younger may
call the hair of a negro his wig. Just because
the woolly savage is remote and barbaric he
seems to be unnaturally neat and tidy. Every-
one must have noticed the same thing in the
fixed and almost offensive color of all unfamil-
iar things, tropic birds and tropic blossoms.
Tropic birds look like staring toys out of a
toy-shop. Tropic flowers simply look like
artificial flowers, like things cut out of wax.
This is a deep matter, and, I think, not un-
connected with divinity; but anyhow it i» the
178

THE COLDNESS OF CHLOE

truth that when we see things for the first time
we feel instantly that they are fictive creations ;
we feel the finger of God. It is only when we
are thoroughly used to them and our five wits
are wearied, that we see them as wild and ob-
jectless; like the shapeless tree-tops or the
shifting cloud. It is the design in Nature that
strikes us first ; the sense of the crosses and con-
fusions in that design only comes afterwards
through experience and an almost eerie monot-
ony. If a man saw the stars abruptly by
accident he would think them as festive and as
artificial as a firework. We talk of the folly
of painting the lily ; but if we saw the lily with-
out warning we should think that it was painted.
We talk of the devil not being so black as he is
painted; but that very phrase is a testimony
to the kinship between what is called vivid and
what is called artificial. If the modern sage
had only one glimpse of grass and sky, he
would say that grass was not as green as it was
painted; that sky was not as blue as it was
painted. If one could see the whole universe
179

THE COLDNESS OF CHLOE

suddenly, it would look like a bright-colored
toy, just as the South American hornbill looks
like a bright-colored toy. And so they are —
both of them, I mean.

But it was not with this aspect of the star-
tling air of artifice about all strange objects
that I meant to deal. I mean merely, as a
guide to history, that we should not be sur-
prised if things wrought in fashions remote
from ours seem artificial; we should convince
ourselves that nine times out of ten these things
are nakedly and almost indecently honest. You
will hear men talk of the frosted classicism of
Corneille or of the powdered pomposities of the
eighteenth century, but all these phrases are
very superficial. There never was an artificial
epoch. There never was an age of reason.
Men were always men and women women: and
their two generous appetites always were the
expression of passion and the telling of truth.
We can see something stiff and quaint in their
mode of expression, just as our descendants
will see something stiff and quaint in our coars-
180

THE COLDNESS OF CHLOE

est slum sketch or our most naked pathological
play. But men have never talked about any-
thing but important things ; and the next force
in femininity which we have to consider can
be considered best perhaps in some dusty old
volume of verses by a person of quality.

The eighteenth century is spoken of as the
period of artificiality, in externals at least ;
but, indeed, there may be two words about that.
In modern speech one uses artificiality as mean-
ing indefinitely a sort of deceit ; and the eigh-
teenth century was far too artificial to deceive.
It cultivated that completest art that does not
conceal the art. Its fashions and costumes
positively revealed nature by avowing artifice;
as in that obvious instance of a barbering that
frosted every head with the same silver. It
would be fantastic to call this a quaint humil-
ity that concealed youth; but, at least, it was
not one with the evil pride that conceals old
age. Under the eighteenth century fashion
people did not so much all pretend to be young,
as all agree to be old. The same applies to the
181

THE COLDNESS OF CHLOE

most odd and unnatural of their fashions ; they
were freakish, but they were not false. A
lady may or may not be as red as she is painted,
but plainly she was not so black as she was
patched.

But I only introduce the reader into this
atmosphere of the older and franker fictions
that he may be induced to have patience for a
moment with a certain element which is very
common in the decoration and literature of that
age and of the two centuries preceding it. It
is necessary to mention it in such a connection
because it is exactly one of those things that
look as superficial as powder, and are really
as rooted as hair.

In all the old flowery and pastoral love-songs,
those of the seventeenth and eighteenth cen-
turies especially, you will find a perpetual re-
proach against woman in the matter of her
coldness ; ceaseless and stale similes that com-
pare her eyes to northern stars, her heart to
ice, or her bosom to snow. Now most of us
have always supposed these old and iterant
182

THE COLDNESS OF CHLOE

phrases to be a mere pattern of dead words, a
thing like a cold wall-paper. Yet I think those
old cavalier poets who wrote about the cold-
ness of Chloe had hold of a psychological truth
missed in nearly all the realistic novels of to-
day. Our psychological romancers perpetually
represent wives as striking terror into their
husbands by rolling on the floor, gnashing their
teeth, throwing about the furniture or poison-
ing the coffee ; all this upon some strange fixed
theory that women are what they call emo-
tional. But in truth the old and frigid form
is much nearer to the vital fact. Most men if
they spoke with any sincerity would agree that
the most terrible quality in women, whether in
friendship, courtship or marriage, was not so
much being emotional as being unemotional.

There is an awful armor of ice which may
be the legitimate protection of a more delicate
organism; but whatever be the psychological
explanation there can surely be no question of
the fact. The instinctive cry of the female in
anger is the noli me tangere. I take this as
183

THE COLDNESS OF CHLOE

the most obvious and at the same time the least
hackneyed instance of a fundamental quality in
the female tradition, which has tended in our
time to be almost immeasurably misunderstood,
both by the cant of moralists and the cant of
immoralists. The proper name for the thing is
modesty; but as we live in an age of prejudice
and must not call things by their right names,
we will yield to a more modern nomenclature
and call it dignity. Whatever else it is, it is
the thing which a thousand poets and a million
lovers have called the coldness of Chloe. It is
akin to the classical, and is at least the oppo-
site of the grotesque. And since we are talking
here chiefly in types and symbols, perhaps as
good an embodiment as any of the idea may be
found in the mere fact of a woman wearing a
skirt. It is highly typical of the rabid plagiar-
ism which now passes everywhere for emanci-
pation, that a little while ago it was common
for an " advanced " woman to claim the right
to wear trousers ; a right about as grotesque
as the right to wear a false nose. Whether
184

THE COLDNESS OF CHLOE

female liberty is much advanced by the act of
wearing a skirt on each leg I do not know;
perhaps Turkish women might offer some in-
formation on the point. But if the western
woman walks about (as it were) trailing the
curtains of the harem with her, it is quite cer-
tain that the woven mansion is meant for a
perambulating palace, not for a perambulating
prison. It is quite certain that the skirt means
female dignity, not female submission; it can
be proved by the simplest of all tests. No
ruler would deliberately dress up in the rec-
ognized fetters of a slave; no judge would
appear covered with broad arrows. But when
men wish to be safely impressive, as judges,
priests or kings, they do wear skirts, the long,
trailing robes of female dignity. The whole
world is under petticoat government; for even
men wear petticoats when they wish to govern.

185

VI

THE PEDANT AND THE SAVAGE

WE say then that the female holds up with
two strong arms these two pillars of civiliza-
tion; we say also that she could do neither,
but for her position; her curious position of
private omnipotence, universality on a small
scale. The first element is thrift; not the de-
structive thrift of the miser, but the creative
thrift of the peasant; the second element is
dignity, which is but the expression of sacred
personality and privacy. Now I know the ques-
tion that will be abruptly and automatically
asked by all that know the dull tricks and
turns of the modern sexual quarrel. The ad-
vanced person will at once begin to argue about
whether these instincts are inherent and in-
evitable in woman or whether they are merely
prejudices produced by her history and educa-
tion. Now I do not propose to discuss whether
186

PEDANT AND SAVAGE

woman could now be educated out of her habits
touching thrift and dignity; and that for two
excellent reasons. First it is a question which
cannot conceivably ever find any answer: that
is why modern people are so fond of it. From
the nature of the case it is obviously impossi-
ble to decide whether any of the peculiarities of
civilized man have been strictly necessary to his
civilization. It is not self-evident (for in-
stance), that even the habit of standing up-
right was the only path of human progress.
There might have been a quadrupedal civiliza-
tion, in which a city gentleman put on four
boots to go to the city every morning. Or
there might have been reptilian civilization, in
which he rolled up to the office on his stomach ;
it is impossible to say that intelligence might
not have developed in such creatures. All we
can say is that man as he is walks upright;
and that woman is something almost more up-
right than uprightness.

And the second point is this : that upon the
whole we rather prefer women (nay, even men)
187

PEDANT AND SAVAGE

to walk upright; so we do not waste much of
our noble lives in inventing any other way for
them to walk. In short, my second reason for
not speculating upon whether woman might get
rid of these peculiarities, is that I do not want
her to get rid of them ; nor does she. I will
not exhaust my intelligence by inventing ways
in which mankind might unlearn the violin or
forget how to ride horses ; and the art of
domesticity seems to me as special and as valu-
able as all the ancient arts of our race. Nor do
I propose to enter at all into those formless
and floundering speculations about how woman
was or is regarded in the primitive times that
we cannot remember, or in the savage countries
which we cannot understand. Even if these
people segregated their women for low or
barbaric reasons it would not make our reasons
barbaric ; and I am haunted with a tenacious
suspicion that these people's feelings were
really, under other forms, very much the same
as ours. Some impatient trader, some super-
ficial missionary, walks across an island and
188

PEDANT AND SAVAGE

sees the squaw digging in the fields while the
man is playing a flute; and immediately says
that the man is a mere lord of creation and the
woman a mere serf. He does not remember that
he might see the same thing in half the back
gardens in Brixton, merely because women are
at once more conscientious and more impatient,
while men are at once more quiescent and more
greedy for pleasure. It may often be in Hawaii
simply as it is in Hoxton. That is, the woman
does not work because the man tells her to
work and she obeys. On the contrary, the wo-
man works because she has told the man to
work, and he hasn't obeyed. I do not affirm
that this is the whole truth, but I do affirm
that we have too little comprehension of the
souls of savages to know how far it is untrue.
It is the same with the relations of our hasty
and surface science, with the problem of sexual
dignity and modesty. Professors find all over
the world fragmentary ceremonies in which the
bride affects some sort of reluctance, hides
from her husband, or runs away from him.
189

PEDANT AND SAVAGE

The professor then pompously proclaims that
this is a survival of Marriage by Capture. I
wonder he never says that the veil thrown over
the bride is really a net. I gravely doubt
whether women ever were married by capture.
I think they pretended to be; as they do still.
It is equally obvious that these two necessary
sanctities of thrift and dignity are bound to
come into collision with the wordiness, the waste-
fulness, and the perpetual pleasure-seeking of
masculine companionship. Wise women allow
for the thing; foolish women try to crush it;
but all women try to counteract it, and they
do well. In many a home all round us at this
moment, we know that the nursery rhyme is
reversed. The queen is in the counting-house,
counting out the money. The king is in the
parlor, eating bread and honey. But it must
be strictly understood that the king has cap-
tured the honey in some heroic wars. The
quarrel can be found in moldering Gothic carv-
ings and in crabbed Greek manuscripts. In
every age, in every land, in every tribe and
190

PEDANT AND SAVAGE

village, has been waged the great sexual war
between the Private House and the Public
House. I have seen a collection of mediaeval
English poems, divided into sections such as
"Religious Carols," "Drinking Songs," and
so on ; and the section headed, " Poems of
Domestic Life" consisted entirely (literally,
entirely) of the complaints of husbands who
were bullied by their wives. Though the Eng-
lish was archaic, the words were in many cases
precisely the same as those which I have heard
in the streets and public houses of Battersea,
protests on behalf of an extension of time and
talk, protests against the nervous impatience
and the devouring utilitarianism of the female.
Such, I say, is the quarrel ; it can never be any-
thing but a quarrel ; but the aim of all morals
and all society is to keep it a lovers' quarrel.

191

vn

THE MODERN" SURRENDER OF
W O M A X

BUT in this corner called England, at this end
of the century, there has happened a strange
and startling thing. Openly and to all ap-
pearance, this ancestral conflict has silently
and abruptly ended ; one of the two sexes has
suddenly surrendered to the other. By the be-
ginning of the twentieth century, within the
last few years, the woman has in public surren-
dered to the man. She has seriously and offi-
cially owned that the man has been right all
along; that the public house (or Parliament)
is really more important than the private house ;
that politics are not (as woman had always
maintained) an excuse for pots of beer, but are
a sacred solemnity to which new female wor-
shipers may kneel; that the talkative patriots
in the tavern are not only admirable but en-
192

THE MODERN SURRENDER

viable; that talk is not a waste of time, and
therefore (as a consequence, surely) that tav-
erns are not a waste of money. All we men
had grown used to oar wires and mothers, and
grandmothers, and great aunts all pouring a
chorus of contempt upon our hobbies of sport,
drink and party politics. 'And now comes Miss
Pankhorst with tears in her eyes, owning that
all the women were wrong and all the men were
right; humbly imploring to be admitted into
so much as an outer court, from which she may
catch a glimpse of those masculine merits
which her erring sisters had so thoughtlessly
scorned.

Now this development naturally perturbs
and even paralyzes us. Males, like females,
in the course of that old fight between the
public and private house, had indulged in over-
statement and extravagance, feeling that they
must keep up their end of the see-saw. We
told our wives that Parliament had sat late on
most essential business; but it never crossed
our minds that our wives would believe ft. We

ids

THE MODERN SURRENDER

said that everyone must have a vote In the
country ; similarly our wives said that no one
must have a pipe in the drawing-room. In
both cases the idea was the same. "It does
not matter much, but if you let those things
slide there is chaos." We said that Lord Hug-
gins or Mr. Buggins was absolutely necessary
to the country. We knew quite well that noth-
ing is necessary to the country except that the
men should be men and the women women. We
knew this ; we thought the women knew it even
more clearly ; and we thought the women would
say it. Suddenly, without warning, the women
have begun to say all the nonsense that we our-
selves hardly believed when we said it. The
solemnity of politics ; the necessity of votes ;
the necessity of Huggins ; the necessity of Bug-
gins ; all these flow in a pellucid stream from
the lips of all the suffragette speakers. I sup-
pose in every fight, however old, one has a
vague aspiration to conquer; but we never
wanted to conquer women so completely as this.
We only expected that they might leave us a

THE MODERN SURRENDER

little more margin for our nonsense; we never
expected that they would accept it seriously
as sense. Therefore I am all at sea about the
existing situation; I scarcely know whether to
be relieved or enraged by this substitution of
the feeble platform lecture for the forcible cur-
tain-lecture. I am lost without the trenchant
and candid Mrs. Caudle. I really do not know
what to do with the prostrate and penitent
Miss Pankhurst. This surrender of the modern
woman has taken us all so much by surprise
that it is desirable to pause a moment, and
collect our wits about what she is really say-
ing.

As I have already remarked, there is one
very simple answer to all this ; these are not
the modern women, but about one in two thou-
sand of the modern women. This fact is im-
portant to a democrat ; but it is of very little
importance to the typically modern mind. Both
the characteristic modern parties believed in
a government by the few; the only difference
is whether it is the Conservative few or Pro-
195

THE MODERN SURRENDER

gressive few. It might be put, somewhat
coarsely perhaps, by saying that one believes
in any minority that is rich and the other in
any minority that is mad. But in this state
of things the democratic argument obviously
falls out for the moment ; and we are bound to
take the prominent minority, merely because it
is prominent. Let us eliminate altogether
from our minds the thousands of women who
detest this cause, and the millions of women
who have hardly heard of it. Let us concede
that the English people itself is not and will
not be for a very long time within the sphere
of practical politics. Let us confine ourselves
to saying that these particular women want
a vote and to asking themselves what a vote is.
If we ask these ladies ourselves what a vote is,
we shall get a very vague reply. It is the only
question, as a rule, for which they are not pre-
pared. For the truth is that they go mainly
by precedent; by the mere fact that men have
yotes already. So far from being a mutinous
movement, it is really a very Conservative one ;
196

THE MODERN SURRENDER

it is in the narrowest rut of the British Con-
stitution. Let us take a little wider and freer
sweep of thought and ask ourselves what is the
ultimate point and meaning of this odd busi-
ness called voting.

197

VIII

THE BRAND OF THE FLEUR-DE-LIS

SEEMINGLY from the dawn of man all nations
have had governments; and all nations have
been ashamed of them. Nothing is more openly
fallacious than to fancy that in ruder or
simpler ages ruling, judging and punishing
appeared perfectly innocent and dignified.
These things were always regarded as the
penalties of the Fall; as part of the humilia-
tion of mankind, as bad in themselves. That
the king can do no wrong was never anything
but a legal fiction ; and it is a legal fiction still.
The doctrine of Divine Right was not a piece
of idealism, but rather a piece of realism, a
practical way of ruling amid the ruin of hu-
manity ; a very pragmatist piece of faith. The
religious basis of government was not so much
that people put their trust in princes, as that
they did not put their trust in any child of
198

BRAND OP FLEUR-DE-LIS

man. It was so with all the ugly institutions
which disfigure human history. Torture and
slavery were never talked of as good things;
they were always talked of as necessary evils.
'A pagan spoke of one man owning ten slaves
just as a modern business man speaks of one
merchant sacking ten clerks: "It's very horri-
ble; but how else can society be conducted?"
A mediaeval scholastic regarded the possibility
of a man being burned to death just as a mod-
ern business man regards the possibility of a
man being starved to death : " It is a shock-
ing torture; but can you organize a painless
world?" It is possible that a future society
may find a way of doing without the question
by hunger as we have done without the ques-
tion by fire. It is equally possible, for the mat-
ter of that, that a future society may re-
establish legal torture with the whole appara-
tus of rack and fagot. The most modern
of countries, America, has introduced with a
vague savor of science, a method which it
calls "the third degree." This is simply the
199

BRAND OF FLEUR-DE-LIS

extortion of secrets by nervous fatigue; which
is surely uncommonly close to their extortion
(by bodily pain. And this is legal and scien-
tific America. Amateur ordinary America, of
course, simply burns people alive in broad day-
light, as they did in the Reformation Wars.
But though some punishments are more in-
human than others there is no such thing as
humane punishment. As long as nineteen men
claim the right in any sense or shape to take
hold of the twentieth man and make him even
mildly uncomfortable, so long the whole pro-
ceeding must be a humiliating one for all con-
cerned. And the proof of how poignantly
men have always felt this lies in the fact that
the headsman and the hangman, the jailors
and the torturers, were always regarded not
merely with fear but with contempt; while all
kinds of careless smiters, bankrupt knights and
swashbucklers and outlaws, were regarded with
indulgence or even admiration. To kill a man
lawlessly was pardoned. To kill a man law-
fully was unpardonable. The most bare-faced
200

BRAND OF FLEUR-DE-LIS

duelist might almost brandish his weapon.
But the executioner was always masked.

This is the first essential element in gov-
ernment ; coercion ; a necessary but not a noble
element. I may remark in passing that when
people say that government rests on force they
give an admirable instance of the foggy and
muddled cynicism of modernity. Government
does not rest on force. Government is force;
it rests on consent or a conception of justice.
A king or a community holding a certain
thing to be abnormal, evil, uses the general
strength to crush it out; the strength is his
tool, but the belief is his only sanction. You
might as well say that glass is the real reason
for telescopes. But arising from whatever
reason the act of government is coercive and
is burdened with all the coarse and painful
qualities of coercion. And if anyone asks what
is the use of insisting on the ugliness of this
task of state violence since all mankind is con-
demned to employ it, I have a simple answer
to that. It would be useless to insist on it if
201

BRAND OF FLEUR-DE-LIS

all humanity were condemned to it. But it is
not irrelevant to insist on its ugliness so long
as half of humanity is kept out of it.

All government then is coercive; we happen
to have created a government which is not only
coercive, but collective. There are only two
kinds of government, as I have already said,
the despotic and the democratic. Aristocracy
is not a government, it is a riot ; that most ef-
fective kind of riot, a riot of the rich. The
most intelligent apologists of aristocracy,
sophists like Burke and Nietzsche, have never
claimed for aristocracy any virtues but the
virtues of a riot, the accidental virtues,
courage, variety and adventure. There is no
case anywhere of aristocracy having estab-
lished a universal and applicable order,
as despots and democracies have often done;
as the last Caesars created the Roman law,
as the last Jacobins created the Code Na-
poleon. With the first of these elemen-
tary forms of government, that of the king
or chieftain, we are not in this matter of the
20$

BRAND OF FLEUR-DE-LIS

sexes immediately concerned. We shall return
to it later when we remark how differently
mankind has dealt with female claims in the
despotic as against the democratic field. But
for the moment the essential point is that in
self-governing countries this coercion of crim-
inals is a collective coercion. The abnormal
person is theoreticallly thumped by a million
fists and kicked by a million feet. If a man is
flogged we all flogged him ; if a man is hanged,
we all hanged him. That is the only possible
meaning of democracy, which can give any
meaning to the first two syllables and also to
the last two. In this sense each citizen has
the high responsibility of a rioter. Every
statute is a declaration of war, to be backed
by arms. Every tribunal is a revolutionary
tribunal. In a republic all punishment is as
sacred and solemn as lynching.

203

IX

SINCERITY AND THE GALLOWS

WHEN, therefore, it is said that the tradition
against Female Suffrage keeps women out of
activity, social influence and citizenship, let us
a little more soberly and strictly ask ourselves
what it actually does keep her out of. It does
definitely keep her out of the collective act of
coercion ; the act of punishment by a mob. The
human tradition does say that, if twenty men
hang a man from a tree or a lamp-post, they
shall be twenty men and not women. Now I
do not think any reasonable Suffragist will
deny that exclusion from this function, to say
the least of it, might be maintained to be a
protection as well as a veto. No candid person
will wholly dismiss the proposition that the
idea of having a Lord Chancellor but not a
Lady Chancellor may at least be connected
with the idea of having a headsman but not a
£04

SINCERITY AND GALLOWS

beadswoman, a hangman but not a bangwoman.
Nor will it be adequate to answer (as is so
often answered to tbis contention) that in mod-
ern civilization women would not really be re-
quired to capture, to sentence, or to slay ; that
all this is done indirectly, that specialists kill
our criminals as they kill our cattle. To urge
this is not to urge the reality of the vote, but
to urge its unreality. Democracy was meant
to be a more direct way of ruling, not a more
indirect way; and if we do not feel that we
are all jailers, so much the worse for us, and
for the prisoners. If it is really an unwomanly
thing to lock up a robber or a tyrant, it ought
to be no softening of the situation that the
woman does not feel as if she were doing the
thing that she certainly is doing. It is bad
enough that men can only associate on paper
who could once associate in the street ; it is bad
enough that men have made a vote very much
of a fiction. It is much worse that a great
class should claim the vote because it is a fic-
tion, who would be sickened by it if it were a

SINCERITY AND GALLOWS

fact. If votes for women do not mean mobs
for women they do not mean what they were
meant to mean. A woman can make a cross
on a paper as well as a man ; a child could do
it as well as a woman ; and a chimpanzee after
a few lessons could do it as well as a child.
But nobody ought to regard it merely as mak-
ing a cross on paper; everyone ought to re-
gard it as what it ultimately is, branding the
fleur-de-lis, marking the broad arrow, signing
the death warrant. Both men and women
ought to face more fully the things they do
or cause to be done ; face them or leave off do-
ing them.

'On that disastrous day when public execu-
tions were abolished, private executions were
renewed and ratified, perhaps forever. Things
grossly unsuited to the moral sentiment of a
society cannot be safely done in broad day-
light; but I see no reason why we should not
still be roasting heretics alive, in a private
room. It is very likely (to speak in the man-
ner foolishly called Irish) that if there were
206

SINCERITY AND GALLOWS

public executions there would be no executions.
The old open-air punishments, the pillory and
the gibbet, at least fixed responsibility upon
the law; and in actual practice they gave the
mob an opportunity of throwing roses as well
as rotten eggs ; of crying " Hosannah " as well
as "Crucify." But I do not like the public
executioner being turned into the private ex-
ecutioner. I think it is a crooked, oriental,
sinister sort of business, and smells of the harem
and the divan rather than of the forum and
the market place. In modern times the official
has lost all the social honor and dignity of
the common hangman. He is only the bearer
of the bowstring.

Here, however, I suggest a plea for a brutal
publicity only in order to emphasize the fact
that it is this brutal publicity and nothing else
from which women have been excluded. I also
say it to emphasize the fact that the mere
modern veiling of the brutality does not make
the situation different, unless we openly say
that we are giving the suffrage, not because it
307

SINCERITY AND GALLOWS

is power, but because it is not; or in other
words, that women are not so much to vote
as to play voting. No suffragist, I suppose,
will take up that position ; and few suffragists
will wholly deny that this human necessity of
pains and penalties is an ugly, humiliating
business, and that good motives as well as bad
may have helped to keep women out of it.
More than once I have remarked in these pages
that female limitations may be the limits of
a temple as well as of a prison, the disabilities
of a priest and not of a pariah. I noted it,
I think, in the case of the pontifical feminine
'dress. In the same way it is not evidently ir-
rational, if men decided that a woman, like a
priest, must not be a shedder of blood.

208

X

THE HIGHER ANARCHY

BUT there is a further fact; forgotten also
because we moderns forget that there is a
female point of view. The woman's wisdom
stands partly, not only for a wholesome hesi-
tation about punishment, but even for a whole-
some hesitation about absolute rules. There
was something feminine and perversely true in
that phrase of Wilde's, that people should not
be treated as the rule, but all of them as ex-
ceptions. Made by a man the remark was a
little effeminate ; for Wilde did lack the mascu-
line power of dogma and of democratic co-
operation. But if a woman had said it it
would have been simply true; a woman does
treat each person as a peculiar person. In
other words, she stands for Anarchy; a very
ancient and arguable philosophy; not anarchy
in the sense of having no customs in one's life
209

THE HIGHER ANARCHY

(which is inconceivable), but anarchy in the
sense of having no rules for one's mind. To
her, almost certainly, are due all those working
traditions that cannot be found in books, espe-
cially those of education ; it was she who first
gave a child a stuffed stocking for being good
or stood him in the corner for being naughty.
This unclassified knowledge is sometimes called
rule of thumb and sometimes motherwit. The
last phrase suggests the whole truth, for none
ever called it fatherwit.

Now anarchy is only tact when it works
badly. Tact is only anarchy when it works
well. And we ought to realize that in one half
of the world — the private house — it does work
well. We modern men are perpetually forget-
ting that the case for clear rules and crude
penalties is not self-evident, that there is a
great deal to be said for the benevolent law-
lessness of the autocrat, especially on a small
scale; in short, that government is only one
side of life. The other half is called Society,
in which women are admittedly dominant. And
210

THE HIGHER ANARCHY

they have always been ready to maintain that
their kingdom is better governed than ours,
because (in the logical and legal sense) it is
not governed at all. "Whenever you have a
real difficulty," they say, " when a boy is
bumptious or an aunt is stingy, when a silly
girl will marry somebody, or a wicked man
won't marry somebody, all your lumbering Ro-
man Law and British Constitution come to a
standstill. A snub from a duchess or a slang-
ing from a fish-wife are much more likely to
put things straight." So, at least, rang the
ancient female challenge down the ages until
the recent female capitulation. So streamed
the red standard of the higher anarchy until
Miss Pankhurst hoisted the white flag.

It must be remembered that the modern
world has done deep treason to the eternal in-
tellect by believing in the swing of the pendu-
lum. A man must be dead before he swings.
It has substituted an idea of fatalistic alter-
nation for the mediaeval freedom of the soul
seeking truth. All modern thinkers are reac-

THE HIGHER ANARCHY

tionaries ; for their thought is always a reaction
from what went before. When you meet a mod-
ern man he is always coming from a place, not
going to it. Thus, mankind has in nearly all
places and periods seen that there is a soul
and a body as plainly as that there is a sun
and moon. But because a narrow Protestant
sect called Materialists declared for a short
time that there was no soul, another narrow
Protestant sect called Christian Science is now
maintaining that there is no body. Now just
in the same way the unreasonable neglect of
government by the Manchester School has pro-
duced, not a reasonable regard for government,
but an unreasonable neglect of everything
else. So that to hear people talk to-day one
would fancy that every important human func-
tion must be organized and avenged by law;
that all education must be state education, and
all employment state employment; that every-
body and everything must be brought to the
foot of the august and prehistoric gibbet.
But a somewhat more liberal and sympathetic

THE HIGHER ANARCHY

examination of mankind will convince us that
the cross is even older than the gibbet, that
voluntary suffering was before and independ-
ence of compulsory; and in short that in most
important matters a man has always been free
to ruin himself if he chose. The huge funda-
mental function upon which all anthropology
turns, that of sex and childbirth, has never
been inside the political state, but always out-
side it. The state concerned itself with the
trivial question of killing people, but wisely
left alone the whole business of getting them
born. A Eugenist might indeed plausibly say
that the government is an absent-minded and
inconsistent person who occupies himself with
providing for the old age of people who have
never been infants. I will not deal here in any
detail with the fact that some Eugenists have
in our time made the maniacal answer that the
police ought to control marriage and birth as
they control labor and death. Except for this
inhuman handful (with whom I regret to say
I shall have to deal later) all the Eugenists I

THE HIGHER ANARCHY

know divide themselves into two sections : in-
genious people who once meant this, and rather
bewildered people who swear they never meant
it — nor anything else. But if it be conceded
(by a breezier estimate of men) that they do
mostly desire marriage to remain free from
government, it does not follow that they desire
it to remain free from everything. If man does
not control the marriage market by law, is it
controlled at all? Surely the answer is broadly
that man does not control the marriage market
by law, but that woman does control it by sym-
pathy and prejudice. There was until lately
a law forbidding a man to marry his deceased
wife's sister; yet the thing happened con-
stantly. There was no law forbidding a man to
marry his deceased wife's scullery-maid; yet it
did not happen nearly so often. It did not
happen because the marriage market is man-
aged in the spirit and by the authority of
women ; and women are generally conservative
where classes are concerned. It is the same
with that system of exclusiveness by which
214.

THE HIGHER ANARCHY

ladies have so often contrived (as by a process
of elimination) to prevent the marriages that
they did not want and even sometimes to pro-
cure those that they did. There is no need
of the broad arrow and the fleur-de-lis, the
turnkey's chains or the hangman's halter.
You need not strangle a man if you can silence
him. The branded shoulder is less effective
and final than the cold shoulder; and you need
not trouble to lock a man in when you can
lock him out.

The same, of course, is true of the colossal
architecture which we call infant education:
an architecture reared wholly by women.
Nothing can ever overcome that one enormous
sex superiority, that even the male child is born
closer to his mother than to his father. No
one, staring at that frightful female privilege,
can quite believe in the equality of the sexes.
Here and there we read of a girl brought up
like a torn-boy ; but every boy is brought up
like a tame girl. The flesh and spirit of fem-
ininity surround him from the first like the
215

THE HIGHER ANARCHY

four walls of a house ; and even the vaguest or1
most brutal man has been womanized by be-
ing born. Man that is born of a woman has
short days and full of misery; but nobody can
picture the obscenity and bestial tragedy that
would belong to such a monster as man that
was born of a man.

216

XI

THE QUEEN AND THE SUI^FRA-
GETTES

BUT, indeed, with this educational matter I
must of necessity embroil myself later. The
fourth section of the discussion is supposed to
be about the child, but I think it will be mostly
about the mother. In this place I have system-
atically insisted on the large part of life that is
governed, not by man with his vote, but by
woman with her voice, or more often, with her
horrible silence. Only one thing remains to be
added. In a sprawling and explanatory style
has been traced out the idea that government
is ultimately coercion, that coercion must mean
cold definitions as well as cruel consequences,
and that therefore there is something to be
said for the old human habit of keeping one-
half of humanity out of so harsh and dirty a
business. But the case is stronger still.
217

QUEEN AND SUFFRAGETTES

Voting is not only coercion, but collective
coercion. I think Queen Victoria would have
been yet more popular and satisfying if she
had never signed a death warrant. I think
Queen Elizabeth would have stood out as more
solid and splendid in history if she had not
earned (among those who happen to know her
history) the nickname of Bloody Bess. I think,
in short, that the great historic woman is more
herself when she is persuasive rather than co-
ercive. But I feel all mankind behind me when
I say that if a woman has this power it should
be despotic power — not democratic power.
There is a much stronger historic argument
for giving Miss Pankhurst a throne than for
giving her a vote. She might have a crown, or
at least a coronet, like so many of her sup-
porters; for these old powers are purely per-
sonal and therefore female. Miss Pankhurst
as a despot might be as virtuous as Queen
Victoria, and she certainly would find it dif-
ficult to be as wicked as Queen Bess; but the
point is that, good or bad, she would be ir-
218

QUEEN AND SUFFRAGETTES

responsible — she would not be governed by a
rule and by a ruler. There are only two
ways of governing: by a rule and by a ruler.
And it is seriously true to say of a woman, in
education and domesticity, that the freedom
of the autocrat appears to be necessary to her.
She is never responsible until she is irrespon-
sible. In case this sounds like an idle contra-
diction, I confidently appeal to the cold facts
of history. Almost every despotic or oli-
garchic state has admitted women to its privi-
leges. Scarcely one democratic state has ever
admitted them to its rights. The reason is
very simple: that something female is endan-
gered by violence; but endangered much more
by the violence of the crowd. In short, one
Pankhurst is an exception, but a thousand
Pankhursts are a nightmare, a Bacchic orgie,
a Witches' Sabbath. For in all legends men
have thought of women as sublime separately
but horrible in a herd.

219

XII
THE MODERN SLAVE

Now I have only taken the test case of Female
Suffrage because it is topical and concrete; it
is not of great moment for me as a political
proposal. I can quite imagine anyone sub-
stantially agreeing with my view of woman as
universalist and autocrat in a limited area ; and
still thinking that she would be none the worse
for a ballot paper. The real question is
whether this old ideal of woman as the great
amateur is admitted or not. There are many
modern things which threaten it much more
than suffragism ; notably the increase of self-
supporting women, even in the most severe or
the most squalid employments. If there be
something against nature in the idea of a horde
of wild women governing, there is something
truly intolerable in the idea of a herd of tame
women being governed. And there are ele-
220

THE MODERN SLAVE

ments in human psychology that make this sit-
uation particularly poignant or ignominious.
The ugly exactitudes of business, the bells and
clocks, the fixed hours and rigid departments,
were all meant for the male: who, as a rule,
can only do one thing and can only with the
greatest difficulty be induced to do that. If
clerks do not try to shirk their work, our whole
great commercial system breaks down. It is
breaking down, under the inroad of women
who are adopting the unprecedented and im-
possible course of taking the system seriously
and doing it well. Their very efficiency is the
idefinition of their slavery. It is generally a
very bad sign when one is trusted very much
by one's employers. And if the evasive clerks
have a look of being blackguards, the earnest
ladies are often something very like blacklegs.
But the more immediate point is that the mod-
ern working woman bears a double burden, for
she endures both the grinding officialism of the
new office and the distracting scrupulosity of
the old home. Few men understand what con-

THE MODERN SLAVE

scientiousness is. They understand duty, which
generally means one duty ; but conscientious-
ness is the duty of the universalist. It is lim-
ited by no work days or holidays ; it is a law-
less, limitless, devouring decorum. If women
are to be subjected to the dull rule of com-
merce, we must find some way of emancipating
them from the wild rule of conscience. But
I rather fancy you will find it easier to leave
the conscience and knock off the commerce. As
it is, the modern clerk or secretary exhausts
herself to put one thing straight in the ledger
and then goes home to put everything straight
in the house.

This condition (described by some as eman-
cipated) is at least the reverse of my ideal.
I would give woman, not more rights, but more
privileges. Instead of sending her to seek such
freedom as notoriously prevails in banks and
factories, I would design specially a house in
which she can be free. And with that we come
to the last point of all ; the point at which we
can perceive the needs of women, like the rights

THE MODERN SLAVE

of men, stopped and falsified by something
which it is the object of this book to expose.

The Feminist (which means, I think, one
who dislikes the chief feminine characteristics)
has heard my loose monologue, bursting all the
time with one pent-up protest. At this point
he will break out and say, " But what are we
to do? There is modern commerce and its
clerks ; there is the modern family with its un-
married daughters; specialism is expected
everywhere ; female thrift and conscientious-
ness are demanded and supplied. What does
it matter whether we should in the abstract
prefer the old human and housekeeping wo-
man; we might prefer the Garden of Eden.
But since women have trades they ought to
have trades unions. Since women work in
factories, they ought to vote on factory-acts.
If they are unmarried they must be commer-
cial ; if they are commercial they must be polit-
ical. We must have new rules for a new
world — even if it be not a better one." I said
to a Feminist once : " The question is not
223

THE MODERN SLAVE

whether women are good enough for votes: it
is whether votes are good enough for women."
He only answered : " Ah, you go and say that
to the women chain-makers on Cradley Heath."
Now this is the attitude which I attack. It
is the huge heresy of Precedent. It is the view-
that because we have got into a mess we must
grow messier to suit it; that because we have
taken a wrong turn some time ago we must go
forward and not backwards; that because we
have lost our way we must lose our map also ;
and because we have missed our ideal, we must
forget it. There are numbers of excellent peo-
ple who do not think votes unfeminine; and
there may be enthusiasts for our beautiful mod-
ern industry who do not think factories un-
feminine. But if these things are unfeminine
it is no answer to say that they fit into each
other. I am not satisfied with the statement
that my daughter must have unwomanly powers
because she has unwomanly wrongs. Industrial
soot and political printer's ink are two blacks
which do not make a white. Most of the Fem-

THE MODERN SLAVE

inists would probably agree with me that
womanhood is under shameful tyranny in the
shops and mills. But I want to destroy the
tyranny. They want to destroy the woman-
hood. That is the only difference.

Whether we can recover the clear vision of
woman as a tower with many windows, the
fixed eternal feminine from which her sons, the
specialists, go forth; whether we can preserve
the tradition of a central thing which is even
more human than democracy and even more
practical than politics; whether, in a word, it
is possible to re-establish the family, freed from
the filthy cynicism and cruelty of the commer-
cial epoch, I shall discuss in the last section of
this book. But meanwhile do not talk to me
about the poor chain-makers on Cradley
Heath. I know all about them and what they
are doing. They are engaged in a very wide-
spread and flourishing industry of the present
age. They are making chains.

PART IV

EDUCATION: OR THE MISTAKE
ABOUT THE CHILD

THE CALVINISM OF TO-DAY

WHEN 1 wrote a little volume on my friend
Mr. Bernard Shaw, it is needless to say that he
reviewed it. I naturally felt tempted to an-
swer and to criticise the book from the same
disinterested and impartial standpoint from
which Mr. Shaw had criticised the subject of
it. I was not withheld by any feeling that the
joke was getting a little obvious; for an ob-
vious joke is only a successful joke; it is only
the unsuccessful clowns who comfort themselves
with being subtle. The real reason why I did
not answer Mr. Shaw's amusing attack was
this: that one simple phrase in it surrendered
to me all that I have ever wanted, or could
want from him to all eternity. I told Mr.
Shaw (in substance) that he was a charming
and clever fellow, but a common Calvinist. He

CALVINISM OF TO-DAY

admitted that this was true ; and there (so far
as I am concerned) is an end of the matter.
He said that, of course, Calvin was quite right
in holding that " if once a man is born it is
too late to damn or save him." That is the
fundamental and subterranean secret; that is
the last lie in hell.

The difference between Puritanism and
Catholicism is not about whether some priestly
word or gesture is significant and sacred. It
is about whether any word or gesture is signifi-
cant and sacred. To the Catholic every other
daily act is a dramatic dedication to the service
of good or of evil. To the Calvinist no act
can have that sort of solemnity, because the
person doing it has been dedicated from eter-
nity, and is merely filling up his time until the
crack of doom. The difference is something
subtler than plum-puddings or private theatri-
cals ; the difference is that to a Christian of
my kind this short earthly life is intensely
thrilling and precious ; to a Calvinist like Mr.
230

CALVINISM OF TO-DAY

Shaw it is confessedly automatic and uninter-
esting. To me these threescore years and ten
are the battle. To the Fabian Calvinist (by;
his own confession) they are only a long pro-
cession of the victors in laurels and the van-
quished in chains. To me earthly life is the
drama; to him it is the epilogue. Shavians
think about the embryo; Spiritualists about
the ghost; Christians about the man. It is
as well to have these things clear.

Now all our sociology and eugenics and the
rest of it are not so much materialist as con-
fusedly Calvinist ; they are chiefly occupied in
educating the child before he exists. The
whole movement is full of a singular depression
about what one can do with the populace, com-
bined with a strange disembodied gayety about
what may be done with posterity. These es-
sential Calvinists have, indeed, abolished some
of the more liberal and universal parts of Cal-
vinism, such as the belief in an intellectual de-
sign or an everlasting happiness. But though
281

CALVINISM OF TO-DAY

Mr. Shaw and his friends admit it is a super-
stition that a man is judged after death, they
stick to their central doctrine, that he is judged
before he is born.

In consequence of this atmosphere of Cal-
vinism in the cultured world of to-day, it is
apparently necessary to begin all arguments
on education with some mention of obstetrics
and the unknown world of the prenatal. All
I shall have to say, however, on heredity will
be very brief, because I shall confine myself
to what is known about it, and that is very
nearly nothing. It is by no means self-evi-
dent, but it is a current modern dogma, that
nothing actually enters the body at birth ex-
cept a life derived and compounded from the
parents. There is at least quite as much to
be said for the Christian theory that an ele-
ment comes from God, or the Buddhist theory
that such an element comes from previous ex-
istences. But this is not a religious work, and
I must submit to those very narrow intellec-
tual limits which the absence of theology al-

CALVINISM OF TO-DAY

ways imposes. Leaving the soul on one side,
let us suppose for the sake of argument that
the human character in the first case comes
wholly from parents; and then let us curtly
state our knowledge, or rather our ignorance.

233

II

THE TRIBAL TERROR

POPULAR, science, like that of Mr. Blatchford,
is in this matter as mild as old wives' tales.
Mr. Blatchford, with colossal simplicity, ex-
plained to millions of clerks and workingmen
that the mother is like a bottle of blue beads
and the father like a bottle of yellow beads;
and so the child is like a bottle of mixed blue
beads and yellow. He might just as well have
said that if the father has two legs and the
mother has two legs, the child will have four
legs. Obviously it is not a question of simple
addition or simple division of a number of hard
detached " qualities," like beads. It is an or-
ganic crisis and transformation of the most
mysterious sort ; so that even if the result is
unavoidable, it will still be unexpected. It is
not like blue beads mixed with yellow beads ;
it is like blue mixed with yellow; the result of

THE TRIBAL TERROR

which is green, a totally novel and unique ex-
perience, a new emotion. A man might live
in a complete cosmos of blue and yellow, like
the " Edinburgh Review " ; a man might never
have seen anything but a golden cornfield and
a sapphire sky ; and still he might never have
had so wild a fancy as green. If you paid a
sovereign for a bluebell ; if you spilled the mus-
tard on the blue-books ; if you married a canary
to a blue baboon; there is nothing in any of
these wild weddings that contains even a hint
of green. Green is not a mental combination,
like addition; it is physical result, like birth.
So, apart from the fact that nobody ever really
understands parents or children either, yet even
if we could understand the parents, we could
not make any conjecture about the children.
Each time the force works in a different way ;
each time the constituent colors combine into
a different spectacle. A girl may actually in-
herit her ugliness from her mother's good looks.
A boy may actually get his weakness from his
father's strength. Even if we admit it is really
£35

THE TRIBAL TERROR

a fate, for us it must remain a fairy tale.
Considered in regard to its causes, the Calvin-
ists and materialists may be right or wrong;
we leave them their dreary debate. But con-
sidered in regard to its results there is no doubt
about it. The thing is always a new color;
a strange star. Every birth is as lonely as a
miracle. Every child is as uninvited as a mon-
strosity.

On all such subjects there is no science, but
only a sort of ardent ignorance; and nobody
has ever been able to offer any theories of
moral heredity which justified themselves in the
only scientific sense; that is that one could cal-
culate on them beforehand. There are six
cases, say, of a grandson having the same
twitch of mouth or vice of character as his
grandfather; or perhaps there are sixteen
cases, or perhaps sixty. But there are not
two cases, there is not one case, there are no
cases at all, of anybody betting half a crown
that the grandfather will have a grandson with
the twitch or the vice. In short, we deal with

THE TRIBAL TERROR

heredity as we deal with omens, affinities and
the fulfillment of dreams. The things do hap-
pen, and when they happen we record them;
but not even a lunatic ever reckons on them.
Indeed, heredity, like dreams and omens, is
a barbaric notion ; that is, not necessarily an
untrue, but a dim, groping and unsystematized
notion. A civilized man feels himself a little
more free from his family. Before Christian-
ity these tales of tribal doom occupied the sav-
age north ; and since the Reformation and the
revolt against Christianity (which is the re-
ligion of a civilized freedom) savagery is slowly
creeping back in the form of realistic novels
and problem plays. The curse of Rougon-
Macquart is as heathen and superstitious as
the curse of Ravenswood; only not so well
written. But in this twilight barbaric sense
the feeling of a racial fate is not irrational,
and may be allowed like a hundred other half
emotions that make life whole. The only es-
sential of tragedy is that one should take it
lightly. But even when the barbarian deluge
237

THE TRIBAL TERROR

rose to its highest in the madder novels of
Zola (such as that called "The Human
Beast**; a gross libel on beasts as well as hu-
manity), even then the application of the he-
reditary idea to practice is avowedly timid and
fumbling. The students of heredity are sav-
ages in tiiis vital sense; that they stare back
at marvels, but they dare not stare forward to
schemes. In practice no one is mad enough
to legislate or educate upon dogmas of physi-
cal inheritance; and even the language of the
thing is rarely used except for special modern
purposes, such as the endowment of research
or the oppression of the poor.

239

m

THE TRICKS OF ENVIRONMENT

AFTER all the modern clatter of Calvinism,
therefore, it is only with the born child that
anybody dares to deal; and the question is
not eugenics hot education. Or again, to
adopt that rather tiresome terminology of pop-
ular science, it is not a question of heredity
but of environment. I will not needlessly com-
plicate this question by urging at length that
environment also is open to some of the objec-
tions and hesitations which paralyze UK em-
ployment of heredity. I will merely suggest
in passing that even about the effect of environ-
ment modern people talk much too cheerfully
and cheaply. The idea that surroundings will
mold a man is always mixed op with the to-
tally different idea that they wffl mold him
in one particular way. To take the broadest
case, landscape no doubt affects the soul; but
how it affects it is quite another matter. To
289

TRICKS OF ENVIRONMENT

be born among pine-trees might mean loving
pine-trees. It might mean loathing pine-trees.
It might quite seriously mean never having seen
a pine-tree. Or it might mean any mixture of
these or any degree of any of them. So that
the scientific method here lacks a little in pre-
cision. I am not speaking without the book;
on the contrary, I am speaking with the blue-
book, with the guide-book and the atlas. It
may be that the Highlanders are poetical be-
cause they inhabit mountains ; but are the Swiss
prosaic because they inhabit mountains? It
may be the Swiss have fought for freedom be-
cause they had hills ; did the Dutch fight for
freedom because they hadn't? Personally I
should think it quite likely. Environment
might work negatively as well as positively.
The Swiss may be sensible, not in spite of their
wild skyline, but because of their wild skyline.
The Flemings may be fantastic artists, not in
spite of their dull skyline, but because of it.

I only pause on this parenthesis to show that,
even in matters admittedly within its range,
240

TRICKS OF ENVIRONMENT

popular science goes a great deal too fast, and
drops enormous links of logic. Nevertheless, it
remains the working reality that what we have
to deal with in the case of children is, for all
practical purposes, environment ; or, to use the
older word, education. When all such de-
ductions are made, education is at least a form
of will-worship, not of cowardly fact-worship ;
it deals with a department that we can control ;
it does not merely darken us with the barbarian
pessimism of Zola and the heredity-hunt. We
shall certainly make fools of ourselves ; that is
what is meant by philosophy. But we shall
not merely make beasts of ourselves ; which is
the nearest popular definition for merely fol-
lowing the laws of Nature and cowering under
the vengeance of the flesh. Education contains
much moonshine ; but not of the sort that makes
mere mooncalves and idiots, the slaves of a
silver magnet, the one eye of the world. In
this decent arena there are fads, but not fren-
zies. Doubtless we shall often find a mare's
nest ; but it will not always be the nightmare's.
241

IV

THE TRUTH ABOUT EDUCATION

WHEN a man is asked to write down what he
really thinks on education, a certain gravity
grips and stiffens his soul, which might b'e
mistaken by the superficial for disgust. If it
be really true that men sickened of sacred words
and wearied of theology, if this largely unrea-
soning irritation against " dogma " did arise
out of some ridiculous excess of such things
among priests in the past, then I fancy we must
be laying up a fine crop of cant for our de-
scendants to grow tired of. Probably the word
" education " will some day seem honestly as
old and objectless as the word "justification"
now seems in a Puritan folio. Gibbon thought
it frightfully funny that people should have
fought about the difference between the " Ho-
moousion " and the " Homoiousion." The
lime will come when somebody will laugh louder
243

TRUTH ABOUT EDUCATION

to think that men thundered against Sectarian
Education and also against Secular Educa-
tion ; that men of prominence and position actu-
ally denounced the schools for teaching a creed
and also for not teaching a faith. The two
Greek words in Gibbon look rather alike; but
they really mean quite different things. Faith
and creed do not look alike, but they mean ex-
actly the same thing. Creed happens to be
the Latin for faith.

Now having read numberless newspaper arti-
cles on education, and even written a good
many of them, and having heard deafening and
indeterminate discussion going on all around
me almost ever since I was born, about whether
religion was a part of education, about whether
hygiene was an essential of education, about
whether militarism was inconsistent with true
education, I naturally pondered much on this
recurring substantive, and I am ashamed to say
that it was comparatively late in life that I
saw the main fact about it.

Of course, the main fact about education is
243

TRUTH ABOUT EDUCATION

that there is no such thing. It does not exist,
as theology or soldiering exist. Theology is
a word like geology, soldiering is a word like
soldering; these sciences may be healthy or no
as hobbies; but they deal with stone and ket-
tles, with definite things. But education is not
a word like geology or kettles. Education is
a word like " transmission " or " inheritance " ;
it is not an object, but a method. It must
mean the conveying of certain facts, views or
qualities, to the last baby born. They might
be the most trivial facts or the most pre-
posterous views or the most offensive quali-
ties ; but if they are handed on from one
generation to another they are education. Ed-
ucation is not a thing like theology ; it is not
an inferior or superior thing; it is not a thing
in the same category of terms. Theology and
education are to each other like a love-letter
to the General Post Office. Mr. Fagin was
quite as educational as Dr. Strong ; in practice
probably more educational. It is giving some-
thing— perhaps poison. Education is tradi-
244

TRUTH ABOUT EDUCATION

tion, and tradition (as its name implies) can
be treason.

This first truth is frankly banal ; but it is so
perpetually ignored in our political prosing
that it must be made plain. A little boy in
a little house, son of a little tradesman, is
taught to eat his breakfast, to take his medi-
cine, to love his country, to say his prayers,
and to wear his Sunday clothes. Obviously
Fagin, if he found such a boy, would teach him
to drink gin, to lie, to betray his country, to
blaspheme and to wear false whiskers. But
so also Mr. Salt the vegetarian would abolish
the boy's breakfast; Mrs. Eddy would throw
away his medicine; Count Tolstoi would re-
buke him for loving his country ; Mr. Blatch-
ford would stop his prayers, and Mr. Edward
Carpenter would theoretically denounce Sunday
clothes, and perhaps all clothes. I do not de-
fend any of these advanced views, not even
Fagin's. But I do ask what, between the lot
of them, has become of the abstract entity
called education. It is not (as commonly sup-
245

TRUTH ABOUT EDUCATION

posed) that the tradesman teaches education
plus Christianity; Mr. Salt, education plus
vegetarianism; Fagin, education plus crime.
The truth is, that there is nothing in common
at all between these teachers, except that they
teach. In short, the only thing they share is
the one thing they profess to dislike: the gen-
eral idea of authority. It is quaint that peo-
ple talk of separating dogma from education.
Dogma is actually the only thing that cannot
be separated from education. It is education.
A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a
teacher who is not teaching.

246

AN EVIL CRY

THE fashionable fallacy is that by education
we can give people something that we have
not got. To hear people talk one would think
it was some sort of magic chemistry, by which,
out of a laborious hotchpotch of hygienic
meals, baths, breathing exercises, fresh air and
freehand drawing, we can produce something
splendid by accident; we can create what we
cannot conceive. These pages have, of course,
no other general purpose than to point out that
we cannot create anything good until we have
conceived it. It is odd that these people, who
in the matter of heredity are so sullenly at-
tached to law, in the matter of environment
seem almost to believe in miracle. They in-
sist that nothing but what was in the bodies
of the parents can go to make the bodies of
the children. But they seem somehow to think
247

AN EVIL CRY

that things can get into the heads of the chil-
dren which were not in the heads of the parents,
or, indeed, anywhere else.

There has arisen in this connection a foolish
and wicked cry typical of the confusion. I
mean the cry, " Save the children." It is, of
course, part of that modern morbidity that in-
sists on treating the State (which is the home
of man) as a sort of desperate expedient in
time of panic. This terrified opportunism is
also the origin of the Socialist and other
schemes. Just as they would collect and share
all the food as men do in a famine, so they
would divide the children from their fathers,
as men do in a shipwreck. That a human com-
munity might conceivably not be in a condition
of famine or shipwreck never seems to cross
their minds. This cry of " Save the children "
has in it the hateful implication that it is im-
possible to save the fathers ; in other words,
that many millions of grown-up, sane, respon-
sible and self-supporting Europeans are to be
treated as dirt or debris and swept away out
248

AN EVIL CRY

of the discussion ; called dipsomaniacs because
they drink in public houses instead of private
houses ; called unemployables because nobody
knows how to get them work; called dullards
if they still adhere to conventions, and called
loafers if they still love liberty. Now I am
concerned, first and last, to maintain that un-
less you can save the fathers, you cannot save
the children ; that at present we cannot save
others, for we cannot save ourselves. We can-
not teach citizenship if we are not citizens;
we cannot free others if we have forgotten the
appetite of freedom. Education is only truth
in a state of transmission ; and how can we pass
on truth if it has never come into our hand?
Thus we find that education is of all the cases
the clearest for our general purpose. It is vain
to save children; for they cannot remain chil-
dren. By hypothesis we are teaching them to
be men ; and how can it be so simple to teach
an ideal manhood to others if it is so vain and
hopeless to find one for ourselves?

I know that certain crazy pedants have at-
249,

AN EVIL CRY

tempted to counter this difficulty by maintain-
ing that education is not instruction at all,
does not teach by authority at all. They pre-
sent the process as coming, not from outside,
from the teacher, but entirely from inside the
boy. Education, they say, is the Latin for
leading out or drawing out the dormant fac-
ulties of each person. Somewhere far down
in the dim boyish soul is a primordial yearn-
ing to learn Greek accents or to wear clean col-
lars; and the schoolmasters only gently and
tenderly liberates this imprisoned purpose.
Sealed up in the newborn babe are the intrinsic
secrets of how to eat asparagus and what was
the date of Bannockburn. The educator only
draws out the child's own unapparent love of
long division ; only leads out the child's own
slightly veiled preference for milk pudding to
tarts. I am not sure that I believe in the
derivation; I have heard the disgraceful sug-
gestion that " educator," if applied to a Roman
schoolmaster, did not mean leading out young
functions into freedom ; but only meant taking
250

AN EVIL CRY

out little boys for a walk. But I am much
more certain that I do not agree with the doc-
trine; I think it would be about as sane to say
that the baby's milk comes from the baby as
to say that the baby's educational merits do.
There is, indeed, in each living creature a
collection of forces and functions ; but educa-
tion means producing these in particular shapes
and training them to particular purposes, or
it means nothing at all. Speaking is the most
practical instance of the whole situation. You
may indeed " draw out " squeals and grunts
from the child by simply poking him and pull-
ing him about, a pleasant but cruel pastime
to which many psychologists are addicted.
But you will wait and watch very patiently
indeed before you draw the English language
out of him. That you have got to put into
him ; and there is an end of the matter.

VI

AUTHORITY THE UNAVOIDABLE

BUT the important point here is only that you
cannot anyhow get rid of authority in educa-
tion; it is not so much (as the poor Conserva-
tives say) that parental authority ought to
be preserved, as that it cannot be destroyed.
Mr. Bernard Shaw once said that he hated the
idea of forming a child's mind. In that case
Mr. Bernard Shaw had better hang himself;
for he hates something inseparable from human
life. I only mentioned educere and the draw-
ing out of the faculties in order to point out
that even this mental trick does not avoid the
inevitable idea of parental or scholastic author-
ity. The educator drawing out is just as ar-
bitary and coercive as the instructor pouring
in ; for he draws out what he chooses. He de-
cides what in the child shall be developed and
what shall not be developed. He does not (I
252

THE UNAVOIDABLE

suppose) draw out the neglected faculty of
forgery. He does not (so far at least) lead
out, with timid steps, a shy talent for tor-
ture. The only result of all this pompous and
precise distinction between the educator and the
instructor is that the instructor pokes where
he likes and the educator pulls where he likes.
Exactly the same intellectual violence is done
to the creature who is poked and pulled. Now
we must all accept the responsibility of this
intellectual violence. Education is violent ; be-
cause it is creative. It is creative because it
is human. It is as reckless as playing on the
fiddle; as dogmatic as drawing a picture; as
brutal as building a house. In short, it is what
all human action is ; it is an interference with
life and growth. After that it is a trifling and
even a jocular question whether we say of this
tremendous tormentor, the artist Man, that he
puts things into us like an apothecary, or draws
things out of us, like a dentist.

The point is that Man does what he likes.
He claims the right to take his mother Nature
253

THE UNAVOIDABLE

under his control; he claims the right to make
his child the Superman, in his image. Once
flinch from this creative authority of man, and
the whole courageous raid which we call civili-
zation wavers and falls to pieces. Now most
modern freedom is at root fear. It is not so
much that we are too bold to endure rules ; it
is rather that we are too timid to endure re-
sponsibilities. And Mr. Shaw and such people
are especially shrinking from that awful and
ancestral responsibility to which our fathers
committed us when they took the wild step of
becoming men. I mean the responsibility of
affirming the truth of our human tradition and
handing it on with a voice of authority, an un-
shaken voice. That is the one eternal educa-
tion ; to be sure enough that something is true
that you dare to tell it to a child. From this
high audacious duty the moderns are fleeing
on every side ; and the only excuse for them is,
'(of course,) that their modern philosophies are
so half-baked and hypothetical that they can-
not convince themselves enough to convince
£54

THE UNAVOIDABLE

even a newborn babe. This, of course, is con-
nected with the decay of democracy; and is
somewhat of a separate subject. Suffice it to
say here that when I say that we should in-
struct our children, I mean that we should do
it, not that Mr. Sully or Professor Earl Barnes
should do it. The trouble in too many of our
modern schools is that the State, being con-
trolled so specially by the few, allows cranks
and experiments to go straight to the school-
room when they have never passed through the
Parliament, the public house, the private house,
the church, or the marketplace. Obviously, it
ought to be the oldest things that are taught
to the youngest people; the assured and ex-
perienced truths that are put first to the baby.
But in a school to-day the baby has to submit
to a system that is younger than himself. The
flopping infant of four actually has more ex-
perience, and has weathered the world longer,
than the dogma to which he is made to submit.
Many a school boasts of having the last ideas
in education, when it has not even the first idea ;
255

THE UNAVOIDABLE

for the first idea is that even innocence, divine
as it is, may learn something from experience.
But this, as I say, is all due to the mere fact
that we are managed by a little oligarchy; my
system presupposes that men who govern them-
selves will govern their children. To-day we
all use Popular Education as meaning educa-
tion of the people. I wish I could use it as
meaning education by the people.

The urgent point at present is that these
expansive educators do not avoid the violence
of authority an inch more than the old school-
masters. Nay, it might be maintained that
they avoid it less. The old village schoolmas-
ter beat a boy for not learning grammar and
sent him out into the playground to play at
anything he liked; or at nothing, if he liked
that better. The modern scientific schoolmas-
ter pursues him into the playground and makes
him play at cricket, because exercise is so
good for the health. The modern Dr. Busby
is a doctor of medicine as well as a doctor of
divinity. He may say that the good of ex-
256

THE UNAVOIDABLE

ercise is self-evident; but he must say it, and
say it with authority. It cannot really be self-
evident or it never could have been compulsory.
But this is in modern practice a very mild case.
In modern practice the free educationists for-
bid far more things than the old-fashioned ed-
ucationists. A person with a taste for para-
dox (if any such shameless creature could ex-
ist) might with some plausibility maintain con-
cerning all our expansion since the failure of
Luther's frank paganism and its replacement
by Calvin's Puritanism, that all this expansion
has not been an expansion, but the closing in
of a prison, so that less and less beautiful and
humane things have been permitted. The Puri-
tans destroyed images ; the Rationalists for-
bade fairy tales. Count Tostoi practically is-
sued one of his papal encyclicals against mu-
sic ; and I have heard of modern educationists
who forbid children to play with tin soldiers.
I remember a meek little madman who came up
to me at some Socialist soiree or other, and
asked me to use my influence (have I any in-
257

THE UNAVOIDABLE

fluence?) against adventure stories for boys.
It seems they breed an appetite for blood.
But never mind that ; one must keep one's tem-
per in this madhouse. I need only insist here
that these things, even if a just deprivation,
are a deprivation. I do not deny that the old
vetoes and punishments were often idiotic and
cruel ; though they are much more so in a coun-
try like England (where in practice only a rich
man decrees the punishment and only a poor
man receives it) than in countries with a clearer
popular tradition — such as Russia. In Russia
flogging is often inflicted by peasants on a
peasant. In modern England flogging can
only in practice be inflicted by a gentleman on
a very poor man. Thus only a few days ago
as I write a small boy (a son of the poor, of
course) was sentenced to flogging and impris-
onment for five years for having picked up
a small piece of coal which the experts value
at 5d. I am entirely on the side of such liberals
and humanitarians as have protested against
this almost bestial ignorance about boys. But
258

THE UNAVOIDABLE

I do think it a little unfair that these human-
itarians, who excuse boys for being robbers,
should denounce them for playing at robbers.
I do think that those who understand a gutter-
snipe playing with a piece of coal might, by
a sudden spurt of imagination, understand him
playing with a tin soldier. To sum it up in
one sentence: I think my meek little madman
might have understood that there is many a
boy who would rather be flogged, and unjustly
flogged, than have his adventure story taken
away.

VII

THE HUMILITY OF MRS. GRUNDY

IN short, the new education is as harsh as the
old, whether or no it is as high. The freest
fad, as much as the strictest formula, is stiff
with authority. It is because the humane
father thinks soldiers wrong that they are for-
bidden ; there is no pretense, there can be no
pretense, that the boy would think so. The
average boy's impression certainly would be
simply this : " If your father is a Methodist
you must not play with soldiers on Sunday.
If your father is a Socialist you must not play
with them even on week days." All education-
ists are utterly dogmatic and authoritarian.
You cannot have free education ; for if you left
a child free you would not educate him at all.
Is there, then, no distinction or difference be-
tween the most hide-bound conventionalists and
260

HUMILITY OF MRS. GRUNDY

the most brilliant and bizarre innovators? Is
there no difference between the heaviest heavy
father and the most reckless and speculative
maiden aunt? Yes; there is. The difference
is that the heavy father, in his heavy way, is
a democrat. He does not urge a thing merely
because to his fancy it should be done; but,
because (in his own admirable republican for-
mula) " Everybody does it." The conven-
tional authority does claim some popular man-
date ; the unconventional authority does not.
The Puritan who forbids soldiers on Sunday
is at least expressing Puritan opinion; not
merely his own opinion. He is not a despot;
he is a democracy, a tyrannical democracy, a
dingy and local democracy perhaps; but one
that could do and has done the two ultimate
virile things — fight and appeal to God. But
the veto of the new educationist is like the veto
of the House of Lords ; it does not pretend to
be representative. These innovators are al-
ways talking about the blushing modesty of
Mrs. Grundy. I do not know whether Mrs.
261

HUMILITY OF MRS. GRUNDY,

Grundy is more modest than they are; but I
am sure she is more humble.

But there is a further complication. The
more anarchic modern may again attempt to
escape the dilemma by saying that education
should only be an enlargement of the mind, an
opening of all the organs of receptivity.
Light (he says) should be brought into dark-
ness; blinded and thwarted existences in all
our ugly corners should merely be permitted
to perceive and expand; in short, enlighten-
ment should be shed over darkest London. Now
here is just the trouble; that, in so far as this
is involved, there is no darkest London. Lon-
don is not dark at all ; not even at night. We
have said that if education is a solid substance,
then there is none of it. We may now say that
if education is an abstract expansion there is
no lack of it. There is far too much of it.
In fact, there is nothing else.

There are no uneducated people. Every-
body in England is educated ; only most peo-
ple are educated wrong. The state schools
262

HUMILITY OF MRS. GRUNDY

were not the first schools, but among the last
schools to be established; and London had been
educating Londoners long before the London
School Board. The error is a highly prac-
tical one. It is persistently assumed that un-
less a child is civilized by the established schools,
he must remain a barbarian. I wish he did.
Every child in London becomes a highly civi-
lized person. But there are so many different
civilizations, most of them born tired. Any-
one will tell you that the trouble with the poor
is not so much that the old are still foolish,
but rather that the young are already wise.
Without going to school at all, the gutter-
boy would be educated. Without going to
school at all, he would be over-educated. The
real object of our schools should be not so much
to suggest complexity as solely to restore sim-
plicity. You will hear venerable idealists de-
clare we must make war on the ignorance of
the poor; but, indeed, we have rather to make
war on their knowledge. Real educationists
have to resist a kind of roaring cataract of
263

HUMILITY OF MRS. GRUNDY

culture. The truant is being taught all day.
If the children do not look at the large letters
in the spelling-book, they need only walk out-
side and look at the large letters on the poster.
If they do not care for the colored maps pro-
vided by the school, they can gape at the col-
ored maps provided by the Dally Hail. If
they tire of electricity, they can take to elec-
tric trams. If they are unmoved by music,
they can take to drink. If they will not work
so as to get a prize from their school, they
may work to get a prize from Prlzy Bits. If
they cannot learn enough about law and cili-
zenship to please the teacher, they learn
enough about them to avoid the policeman.
If they will not learn history forwards from
the right end in the history books, they will
learn it backwards from the wrong end in the
party newspapers. And this is the tragedy of
the whole affair: that the London poor, a
particularly quick-witted and civilized class,
learn everything tail foremost, learn even what
is right in the way of what is wrong. They
264

HUMILITY OF MRS. GRUNDY

do not see the first principles of law in a law
book ; they only see its last results in the police
news. They do not see the truths of politics
in a general survey. They only see the lies
of politics, at a General Election.

But whatever be the pathos of the London
poor, it has nothing to do with being unedu-
cated. So far from being without guidance,
they are guided constantly, earnestly, excit-
edly; only guided wrong. The poor are not
at all neglected, they are merely oppressed;
nay, rather they are persecuted. There are
no people in London who are not appealed to
by the rich ; the appeals of the rich shriek from
every hoarding and shout from every hustings.
For it should always be remembered that the
queer, abrupt ugliness of our streets and cos-
tumes are not the creation of democracy, but
of aristocracy. The House of Lords objected
to the Embankment being disfigured by trams.
But most of the rich men who disfigure the
street-walls with their wares are actually in the
House of Lords. The peers make the country
265

HUMILITY OF MRS. GRUNDY

seats beautiful by making the town streets hide-
ous. This, however, is parenthetical. The
point is, that the poor in London are not left
alone, but rather deafened and bewildered with
raucous and despotic advice. They are not
like sheep without a shepherd. They are more
like one sheep whom twenty-seven shepherds are
shouting at. All the newspapers, all the new
advertisements, all the new medicines and new
theologies, all the glare and blare of the gas
and brass of modern times — it is against these
that the national school must bear up if it
can. I will not question that our elementary
education is better than barbaric ignorance.
But there is no barbaric ignorance. I do not
doubt that our schools would be good for un-
instructed boys. But there are no uninstructed
boys. A modern London, school ought not
merely to be clearer, kindlier, more clever and
more rapid than ignorance and darkness. It
must also be clearer than a picture postcard,
cleverer than a Limerick competition, quicker
than the tram, and kindlier than the tavern.
266

HUMILITY OF MRS. GRUNDY

The school, in fact, has the responsibility of
universal rivalry. We need not deny that
everywhere there is a light that must conquer
darkness. But here we demand a light that
can conquer light.

267

VIII

THE BROKEN RAINBOW

I WILL take one case that will serve both as
symbol and example: the case of color. We
hear the realists (those sentimental fellows)1
talking about the gray streets and the gray
lives of the poor. But whatever the poor
streets are they are not gray; but motley,
striped, spotted, piebald and patched like a
quilt. Hoxton is not aesthetic enough to be
monochrome ; and there is nothing of the Celtic
twilight about it. As a matter of fact, a Lon-
don gutter-boy walks unscathed among fur-
naces of color. Watch him walk along a line
of hoardings, and you will see him now against
glowing green, like a traveler in a tropic forest ;
now black like a bird against the burning blue
of the Midi; now passant across a field gules,
like the golden leopards of England. He
ought to understand the irrational rapture of

THE BROKEN RAINBOW

that cry of Mr. Stephen Phillips about " that
bluer blue, that greener green." There is no
blue much bluer than Reckitt's Blue and no
blacking blacker than Day and Martin's; no
more emphatic yellow than that of Colman's
Mustard. If, despite this chaos of color, like
a shattered rainbow, the spirit of the small
boy is not exactly intoxicated with art and cul-
ture, the cause certainly does not lie in univer-
sal grayness or the mere starving of his senses.
It lies in the fact that the colors are pre-
sented in the wrong connection, on the wrong
scale, and, above all, from the wrong motive.
It> is not colors he lacks, but a philosophy of
colors. In short, there is nothing wrong with
Reckitt's Blue except that it is not Reckitt's.
Blue does not belong to Reckitt, but to the
sky ; black does not belong to Day and Martin,
but to the abyss. Even the finest posters are
only very little things on a very large scale.
There is something specially irritant in this
way about the iteration of advertisements of
mustard: a condiment, a small luxury; a thing
269

THE BROKEN RAINBOW

in its nature not to be taken in quantity.
There is a special irony in these starving streets
to see such a great deal of mustard to such
very little meat. Yellow is a bright pigment;
mustard is a pungent pleasure. But to look
at these seas of yellow is to be like a man who
should swallow gallons of mustard. He would
either die, or lose the taste of mustard alto-
gether.

Now suppose we compare these gigantic
trivialities on the hoardings with those tiny
and tremendous pictures in which the mediaevals
recorded their dreams ; little pictures where the
blue sky is hardly longer than a single sapphire,
and the fires of judgment only a pigmy patch
of gold. The difference here is not merely
that poster art is in its nature more hasty than
illumination art ; it is not even merely that the
ancient artist was serving the Lord while the
modern artist is serving the lords. It is that
the old artist contrived to convey an impression
that colors really were significant and precious
things, like jewels and talismanic stones. The
270

THE BROKEN RAINBOW

color was often arbitrary; but it was always
authoritative. If a bird was blue, if a tree was
golden, if a fish was silver, if a cloud was scar-
let, the artist managed to convey that these
colors were important and almost painfully in-
tense ; all the red red-hot and all the gold tried
in the fire. Now that is the spirit touching
color which the schools must recover and pro-
tect if they are really to give the children any
imaginative appetite or pleasure in the thing.
It is not so much an indulgence in color; it
is rather, if anything, a sort of fiery thrift. It
fenced in a green field in heraldry as straitly
as a green field in peasant proprietorship. It
would not fling away gold leaf any more than
gold coin; it would not heedlessly pour out
purple or crimson, any more tljan it would spill
good wine or shed blameless blood. That is
the hard task before educationists in this
special matter; they have to teach people to
relish colors like liquors. They have the heavy
business of turning drunkards into wine tasters.
If even the twentieth century succeeds in doing
£71

THE BROKEN RAINBOW

these things, it will almost catch up with the
twelfth.

The principle covers, however, the whole of
modern life. Morris and the merely aesthetic
medievalists always indicated that a crowd in
the time of Chaucer would have been brightly
clad and glittering, compared with a crowd in
the time of Queen Victoria. I am not so sure
that the real distinction is here. There would
be brown frocks of friars in the first scene as
well as brown bowlers of clerks in the second.
There would be purple plumes of factory girls
in the second scene as well as purple lenten
yestments in the first. There would be white
waistcoats against white ermine; gold watch
chains against gold lions. The real differ-
ence is this : that the brown earth-color of the
monk's coat was instinctively chosen to express
labor and humility, whereas the brown color
of the clerk's hat was not chosen to express
anything. The monk did mean to say that
he robed himself in dust. I am sure the clerk
does not mean to say that he crowns himself

THE BROKEN RAINBOW

with clay. He is not putting dust on his head,
as the only diadem of man. Purple, at once
rich and somber, does suggest a triumph tem-
porarily eclipsed by a tragedy. But the fac-
tory girl does not intend her hat to express
a triumph temporarily eclipsed by a tragedy;
far from it. White ermine was meant to ex-
press moral purity; white waistcoats were not.
Gold lions do suggest a flaming magnanimity;
gold watch chains do not. The point is not
that we have lost the material hues, but that
we have lost the trick of turning them to the
best advantage. We are not like children who
have lost their paint-box and are left alone
with a gray lead-pencil. We are like children
who have mixed all the colors in the paint-box
together and lost the paper of instructions.
Even then (I do not deny) one has some fun.
Now this abundance of colors and loss of
a color scheme is a pretty perfect parable of
all that is wrong with our modern ideals and
especially with our modern education. It is
the same with ethical education, economic edu-
273

THE BROKEN RAINBOW

cation, every sort of education. The growing
London child will find no lack of highly con-
troversial teachers who will teach him that ge-
ography means painting the map red ; that
economics means taxing the foreigner; that
patriotism means the peculiarly un-English
habit of flying a flag on Empire Day. In
mentioning these examples specially I do not
mean to imply that there are no similar crudi-
ties and popular fallacies upon the other politi-
cal side. I mention them because they consti-
tute a very special and arresting feature of the
situation. I mean this, that there were always
Radical revolutionists ; but now there are Tory
revolutionists also. The modern Conservative
no longer conserves. He is avowedly an inno-
vator. Thus all the current defenses of the
House of Lords which describe it as a bulwark
against the mob, are intellectually done for;
the bottom has fallen out of them ; because
on five or six of the most turbulent topics of
the day, the House of Lords is a mob itself;
and exceedingly likely to behave like one.

IX

THE NEED FOR NARROWNESS

THROUGH all this chaos, then, we come back
once more to our main conclusion. The true
task of culture to-day is not a task of expan-
sion, but very decidedly of selection — and re-
jection. The educationist must find a creed
and teach it. Even if it be not a theological
creed, it must still be as fastidious and as firm
as theology. In short, it must be orthodox.
The teacher may think it antiquated to have
to decide precisely between the faith of Calvin
and of Laud, the faith of Aquinas and of
Swedenborg ; but he still has to choose between
the faith of Kipling and of Shaw, between the
world of Blatchford and of General Booth.
Call it, if you will, a narrow question whether
your child shall be brought up by vicar or the
minister or the popish priest. You have still
to face that larger, more liberal, more highly
275

NEED FOR NARROWNESS

civilized question, of whether he shall be brought
up by Harmsworth or by Pearson, by Mr.
Eustace Miles with his Simple Life or Mr. Peter
Keary with his Strenuous Life; whether he
shall most eagerly read Miss Annie S. Swan
or Mr. Bart Kennedy; in short, whether he
shall end up in the mere violence of the S. D.
F., or in the mere vulgarity of the Primrose
League. They say that nowadays the creeds
are crumbling; I doubt it, but at least the
sects are increasing; and education must now
be sectarian education, merely for practical
purposes. Out of all this throng of theories
it must somehow select a theory; out of all
these thundering voices it must manage to hear
a voice ; out of all this awful and aching battle
of blinding lights, without one shadow to give
shape to them, it must manage somehow to
trace and to track a star.

I have spoken so far of popular education,

which began too vague and vast and which

therefore has accomplished little. But as it

happens there is in England something to com-

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NEED FOR NARROWNESS

pare it with. There is an institution, or class
of institutions, which began with the same pop-
ular object, which has since followed a much
narrower object; but which had the great ad-
vantage that it did follow some object, unlike
our modern elementary schools.

In all these problems I should urge the solu-
tion which is positive, or, as silly people say,
" optimistic." I should set my face, that is,
against most of the solutions that are solely
negative and abolitionist. Most educators of
the poor seem to think that they have to teach
the poor man not to drink. I should be quite
content if they teach him to drink ; for it is
mere ignorance about how to drink and when
to drink that is accountable for most of his
tragedies. I do not propose (like some of my
revolutionary friends) that we should abolish
the public schools. I propose the much more
lurid and desperate experiment that we should
make them public. I do not wish to make Par-
liament stop working, but rather to make it
work; not to shut up churches, but rather to
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NEED FOR NARROWNESS

open them ; not to put out the lamp of learn-
ing or destroy the hedge of property, but only
to make some rude effort to make universities
fairly universal and property decently proper.
In many cases, let it be remembered, such
action is not merely going back to the old
ideal, but is even going back to the old reality.
It would be a great step forward for the gin
shop to go back to the inn. It is incontro-
vertibly true that to medisevalize the public
schools would be to democratize the public
schools. Parliament did once really mean (as
its name seems to imply) a place where people
were allowed to talk. It is only lately that
the general increase of efficiency, that is, of the
Speaker, has made it mostly a place where peo-
ple are prevented from talking. The poor do
not go to the modern church, but they went
to the ancient church all right ; and if the com-
mon man in the past had a grave respect for
property, it may conceivably have been because
he sometimes had some of his own. I therefore
can claim that I have no vulgar itch of inno-
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NEED FOR NARROWNESS

vation in anything I say about any of these
institutions. Certainly I have none in that
particular one which I am now obliged to pick
out of the list; a type of institution to which
I have genuine and personal reasons for being
friendly and grateful : I mean the great Tudor
foundations, the public schools of England.
They have been praised for a great many
things, mostly, I am sorry to say, praised by
themselves and their children. And yet for
some reason no one has ever praised them for
the one really convincing reason.

379

X

THE CASE FOR THE PUBLIC
SCHOOLS

THE word success can of course be used in two
senses. It may be used with reference to a
thing serving its immediate and peculiar pur-
pose, as of a wheel going around; or it can be
used with reference to a thing adding to the
general welfare, as of a wheel being a useful
discovery. It is one thing to say that Smith's
flying machine is a failure, and quite another
to say that Smith has failed to make a flying
machine. Now this is very broadly the differ-
ence between the old English public schools
and the new democratic schools. Perhaps the
old public schools are (as I personally think
they are) ultimately weakening the country
rather than strengthening it, and are there-
fore, in that ultimate sense, inefficient. But
there is such a thing as being efficiently ineffi-
cient. You can make your flying ship so that
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CASE FOR PUBLIC SCHOOLS

it flies, even if you also make it so that it kills
you. Now the public-school system may not
work satisfactorily, but it works ; the public
schools may not achieve what we want, but they
achieve what they want. The popular elemen-
tary schools do not in that sense achieve any-
thing at ajl. It is very difficult to point to
any guttersnipe in the street and say that he
embodies the ideal for which popular education
has been working, in the sense that the fresh-
faced, foolish boy in " Etons " does embody the
ideal for which the headmasters of Harrow and
Winchester have been working. The aristo-
cratic educationists have the positive purpose
of turning out gentlemen ; and they do turn
out gentlemen, even when they expel them. The
popular educationists would say that they had
the far nobler idea of turning out citizens. I
concede that it is a much nobler idea, but where
are the citizens? I know that the boy in
" Etons " is stiff with a rather silly and senti-
mental stoicism, called being a man of the
world. I do not fancy that the errand-boy is
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CASE FOR PUBLIC SCHOOLS

rigid with that republican stoicism that is called
being a citizen. The schoolboy will really say
with fresh and innocent hauteur, " I am an
English gentleman." I cannot so easily pic-
ture the errand-boy drawing up his head to
the stars and answering, "Romanus civis
sum." Let it be granted that our elementary
teachers are teaching the very broadest code
of morals, while our great headmasters are
teaching only the narrowest code of manners.
Let it be granted that both these things are
being taught. But only one of them is being
learned.

It is always said that great reformers or
masters of events can manage to bring about
some specific and practical reforms, but that
they never fulfill their visions or satisfy their
souls. I believe there is a real sense in which
this apparent platitude is quite untrue. By a
strange inversion the political idealist often
does not get what he asks for, but does get
what' he wants. The silent pressure of his ideal
lasts much longer and reshapes the world much
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CASE FOR PUBLIC SCHOOLS

more than the actualities by which he at-
tempted to suggest it. What perishes is the
letter, which he thought so practical. What
endures is the spirit, which he felt to be unat-
tainable and even unutterable. It is exactly
his schemes that are not fulfilled; it is exactly
his vision that is fulfilled. Thus the ten or
twelve paper constitutions of the French Revo-
lution, which seemed so business-like to the
framers of them, seem to us to have flown away
on the wind as the wildest fancies. What has
not flown away, what is a fixed fact in Europe,
is the ideal and vision. The Republic, the idea
of a land full of mere citizens all with some
minimum of manners and minimum of wealth,
the vision of the eighteenth century, the reality
of the twentieth. So I think it will generally
be with the creator of social things, desirable
or undesirable. All his schemes will fail, all his
tools break in his hands. His compromises will
collapse, his concessions will be useless. He
must brace himself to bear his fate; he shall
have nothing but his heart's desire.
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CASE FOR PUBLIC SCHOOLS

Now if one may compare very small things
with very great, one may say that the English
aristocratic schools can claim something of the
same sort of success and solid splendor as the
French democratic politics. At least they can
claim the same sort of superiority over the dis-
tracted and fumbling attempts of modern Eng-
land to establish democratic education. Such
success as has attended the public schoolboy
throughout the Empire, a success exaggerated
indeed by himself, but still positive and a fact
of a certain indisputable shape and size, has
been due to the central and supreme circum-
stance that the managers of our public schools
did know what sort of boy they liked. They
wanted something and they got something; in-
stead of going to work in the broad-minded
manner and wanting everything and getting
nothing.

The only thing in question is the quality of
the thing they got. There is something highly
maddening in the circumstance that when mod-
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CASE FOR PUBLIC SCHOOLS

ern people attack an institution that really
does demand reform, they always attack it for
the wrong reasons. Thus many opponents of
our public schools, imagining themselves to be
very democratic, have exhausted themselves in
an unmeaning attack upon the study of Greek.
I can understand how Greek may be regarded
as useless, especially by those thirsting to throw
themselves into the cutthroat commerce which
is the negation of citizenship; but I do not
understand how it can be considered undemo-
cratic. I quite understand why Mr. Carnegie
has a hatred of Greek. It is obscurely founded
on the firm and sound impression that in any
self-governing Greek city he would have been
killed. But I cannot comprehend why any
chance democrat, say Mr. Quelch, or Mr. Will
Crooks, or Mr. John M. Robertson, should be
opposed to people learning the Greek alphabet,
which was the alphabet of liberty. Why should
Radicals dislike Greek? In that language is
written all the earliest and, Heaven knows, the
285

CASE FOR PUBLIC SCHOOLS

most heroic history of the Radical party. Why
should Greek disgust a democrat, when the very
word democrat is Greek?

A similar mistake, though a less serious one,
is merely attacking the athletics of public
schools as something promoting animalism and
brutality. Now brutality, in the only immoral
sense, is not a vice of the English public
schools. There is much moral bullying, owing
to the general lack of moral courage in the
public-school atmosphere. These schools do,
upon the whole, enocurage physical courage;
but they do not merely discourage moral cour-
age, they forbid it. The ultimate result of the
thing is seen in the egregious English officer
who cannot even endure to wear a bright uni-
form except when it is blurred and hidden in
the smoke of battle. This, like all the affec-
tations of our present plutocracy, is an entirely
modern thing. It was unknown to the old aris-
tocrats. The Black Prince would certainly
have asked that any knight who had the cour-
age to lift his crest among his enemies, should
286

CASE FOR PUBLIC SCHOOLS

also have the courage to lift it among his
friends. As regards moral courage, then, it is
not so much that the public schools support it
feebly, as that they suppress it firmly. But
physical courage they do, on the whole, sup-
port; and physical courage is a magnificent
fundamental. The one great, wise Englishman
of the eighteenth century said truly that if a
man lost that virtue he could never be sure of
keeping any other. Now it is one of the mean
and morbid modern lies that physical courage
is connected with cruelty. The Tolstoian and
Kiplingite are nowhere more at one than in
maintaining this. They have, I believe, some
small sectarian quarrel with each other, the one
saying that courage must be abandoned because
it is connected with cruelty, and the other main-
taining that cruelty is charming because it is
a part of courage. But it is all, thank God, a
lie. An energy and boldness of body may make
a man stupid or reckless or dull or drunk or
hungry, but it does not make him spiteful. And
we may admit heartily (without joining in that
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CASE FOR PUBLIC SCHOOLS

perpetual praise which public-school men are
always pouring upon themselves) that this does
operate to the removal of mere evil cruelty in
the public schools. English public-school life
is extremely like English public life, for which
it is the preparatory school. It is like it spe-
cially in this, that things are either very open,
common and conventional, or else are very se-
cret indeed. Now there is cruelty in public
schools, just as there is kleptomania and secret
drinking and vices without a name. But these
things do not flourish in the full daylight and
common consciousness of the school ; and no
more does cruelty. A tiny trio of sullen-looking
boys gather in corners and seem to have some
ugly business always ; it may be indecent liter-
ature, it may be the beginning of drink, it may
occasionally be cruelty to little boys. But on
this stage the bully is not a braggart. The
proverb says that bullies are always cowardly,
but these bullies are more than cowardly ; they
are shy.

As a third instance of the wrong form of
288

CASE FOR PUBLIC SCHOOLS

revolt against the public schools, I may men-
tion the habit of using the word aristocracy
with a double implication. To put the plain
truth as briefly as possible, if aristocracy means
rule by a rich ring, England has aristocracy
and the English public schools support it. If
it means rule by ancient families or flawless
blood, England has not got aristocracy, and
the public schools systematically destroy it. In
these circles real aristocracy, like real democ-
racy, has become bad form. A modern fash-
ionable host dare not praise his ancestry; it
would so often be an insult to half the other
oligarchs at table, who have no ancestry. We
have said he has not the moral courage to wear
his uniform ; still less has he the moral courage
to wear his coat-of-arms. The whole thing now
is only a vague hotch-potch of nice and nasty
gentlemen. The nice gentleman never refers to
anyone else's father, the nasty gentleman never
refers to his own. That is the only difference ;
the rest is the public-school manner. But Eton
and Harrow have to be aristocratic because
289

CASE FOR PUBLIC SCHOOLS

they consist so largely of parvenues. The pub-
lic school is not a sort of refuge for aristocrats,
like an asylum, a place where they go in and
never come out. It is a factory for aristocrats ;
they come out without ever having perceptibly
gone in. The poor little private schools, in
their old-world, sentimental, feudal style, used
to stick up a notice, " For the Sons of Gentle-
men only." If the public schools stuck up a
notice it ought to be inscribed, " For the Fath-
ers of Gentlemen only." In two generations
they can. do the trick.

290

xt

THE SCHOOL FOR HYPOCRITES

THESE are the false accusations; the accusa-
tion of classicism, the accusation of cruelty,
and the accusation of an exclusiveness based
on perfection of pedigree. English public-school
boys are not pedants, they are not torturers ;
and they are not, in the vast majority of cases,
people fiercely proud of their ancestry, or even
people with any ancestry to be proud of. They
are taught to be courteous, to be good tem-
pered, to be brave in a bodily sense, to be clean
in a bodily sense; they are generally kind to
animals, generally civil to servants, and to
anyone in any sense their equal, the j oiliest
companions on earth. Is there then anything
wrong in the public-school ideal? I think we
all feel there is something very wrong in it, but
a blinding network of newspaper phraseology
obscures and entangles us; so that it is hard
291

SCHOOL FOR HYPOCRITES

to trace to its beginning, beyond all words and
phases, the faults in this great English achieve-
ment.

Surely, when all is said, the ultimate objec-
tion to the English public school is its utterly
blatant and indecent disregard of the duty of
telling the truth. I know there does still linger
among maiden ladies in remote country houses
a notion that English schoolboys are taught to
tell the truth, but it cannot be maintained seri-
ously for a moment. Very occasionally, very
vaguely, English schoolboys are told not to
tell lies, which is a totally different thing. I
may silently support all the obscene fictions and
forgeries in the universe, .without once telling
a lie. I may wear another man's coat, steal
another man's wit, apostatize to another man's
creed, or poison another man's coffee, all with-
out ever telling a lie. But no English school-
boy is ever taught to tell the truth, for the
very simple reason that he is never taught to
desire the truth. From the very first he is
taught to be totally careless about whether a

SCHOOL FOR HYPOCRITES

fact is a fact ; he is taught to care only whether
the fact can be used on his " side " when he is
engaged in " playing the game." He takes
sides in his Union debating society to settle
whether Charles I. ought to have been killed,
with the same solemn and pompous frivolity
with which he takes sides in the cricket field to
(decide whether Rugby or Westminster shall
win. He is never allowed to admit the abstract
notion of the truth, that the match is a mat-
ter of what may happen, but that Charles I.
is a matter of what did happen — or did not.
He is Liberal or Tory at the general election
exactly as he is Oxford or Cambridge at the
boat-race. He knows that sport deals with the
unknown ; he has not even a notion that pol-
itics should deal with the known. If anyone
really doubts this self-evident proposition, that
the public schools definitely discourage the love
of truth, there is one fact which I should think
would settle him. England is the country of
the Party System, and it has always been
chiefly run by public-school men. Is there any-
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SCHOOL FOR HYPOCRITES

one out of Hanwell who will maintain that the
Party System, whatever its conveniences or in-
conveniences, could have been created by peo-
ple particularly fond of truth?

The very English happiness on this point is
itself a hypocrisy. When a man really tells
the truth, the first truth he tells is that he him-
self is a liar. David said in his haste, that is,
in his honesty, that all men are liars. It was
afterwards, in some leisurely official explana-
tion, that he said that Kings of Israel at least
told the truth. When Lord Curzon was Viceroy
he delivered a moral lecture to the Indians on
their reputed indifference to veracity, to ac-
tuality and intellectual honor. A great many
people indignantly discussed whether orientals
deserved to receive this rebuke ; whether Indians
were indeed in a position to receive such severe
admonition. No one seemed to ask, as I should
venture to ask, whether Lord Curzon was in a
position to give it. He is an ordinary party
politician ; a party politician means a politi-
cian who might have belonged to either party.
294.

SCHOOL FOR HYPOCRITES

Being such a person, he must again and again,
at every twist and turn of party strategy,
either have deceived others or grossly deceived
himself. I do not know the East ; nor do I like
what I know. I am quite ready to believe that
when Lord Curzon went out he found a very
false atmosphere. I only say it must have been
something startlingly and chokingly false if it
was falser than that English atmosphere from
which he came. The English Parliament ac-
tually cares for everything except veracity.
The public-school man is kind, courageous, po-
lite, clean, companionable; but, in the most
awful sense of the words, the truth is not in
him.

This weakness of untruthfulness in the Eng-
lish public schools, in the English political sys-
tem, and to some extent in the English charac-
ter, is a weakness which necessarily produces a
curious crop of superstitions, of lying legends,
of evident delusions clung to through low spir-
itual self-indulgence. There are so many of
these public-school superstitions that I have
295

SCHOOL FOR HYPOCRITES

here only space for one of them, which may be
called the superstition of soap. It appears to
have been shared by the ablutionary Pharisees,
who resembled the English public-school aris-
tocrats in so many respects : in their care about
club rules and traditions, in their offensive op-
timism at the expense of other people, and
above all in their unimaginative plodding pa-
triotism in the worst interests of their country.
Now the old human common sense about wash-
ing is that it is a great pleasure. Water
(applied externally) is a splendid thing, like
wine. Sybarites bathe in wine, and Noncon-
formists drink water; but we are not concerned
with these frantic exceptions. Washing being
a pleasure, it stands to reason that rich people
can afford it more than poor people, and as
long as this was recognized all was well; and
it was very right that rich people should offer
baths to poor people, as they might offer any
other agreeable thing — a drink or a donkey
ride. But one dreadful day, somewhere about
the middle of the nineteenth century, somebody
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SCHOOL FOR HYPOCRITES

discovered (somebody pretty well off) the two
great modern truths, that washing is a virtue
in the rich and therefore a duty in the poor.
For a duty is a virtue that one can't do. And
a virtue is generally a duty that one can do
quite easily ; like the bodily cleanliness of the
upper classes. But in the public-school tradi-
tion of public life, soap has become creditable
simply because it is pleasant. Baths are rep-
resented as a part of the decay of the Roman
Empire; but the same baths are represented as
part of the energy and rejuvenation of the
British Empire. There are distinguished pub-
lic-school men, bishops, dons, headmasters, and
high politicians, who, in the course of the eu-
logies which from time to time they pass upon
themselves, have actually identified physical
cleanliness with moral purity. They say (if I
remember rightly) that a public-school man is
clean inside and out. As if everyone did not
know that while saints can afford to be dirty,
seducers have to be clean. As if everyone did
not know that the harlot must be clean, because
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SCHOOL FOR HYPOCRITES

it is her business to captivate, while the good
wife may be dirty, because it is her business to
clean. As if we did not all know that whenever
God's thunder cracks above us, it is very likely
indeed to find the simplest man in a muck
cart and the most complex blackguard in a
bath.

There are other instances, of course, of this
oily trick of turning the pleasures of a gentle-
man into the virtues of an Anglo-Saxon.
Sport, like soap, is an admirable thing, but,
like soap, it is an agreeable thing. And it does
not sum up all mortal merits to be a sports-
man playing the game in a world where it is so
often necessary to be a workman doing the
work. By all means let a gentleman congrat-
ulate himself that he has not lost his natural
love of pleasure, as against the blase, and un-
childlike. But when one has the childlike joy
it is best to have also the childlike unconscious-
ness ; and I do not think we should have special
affection for the little boy who everlastingly
explained that it was his duty to play Hide

SCHOOL FOR HYPOCRITES

and Seek and one of his family virtues to be
prominent in Puss in the Corner.

Another such irritating hypocrisy is the
oligarchic attitude towards mendicity as
against organized charity. Here again, as in
the case of cleanliness and of athletics, the
attitude would be perfectly human and intel-
ligible if it were not maintained as a merit.
Just as the obvious thing about soap is that
it is a convenience, so the obvious thing about
beggars is that they are an inconvenience.
The rich would deserve very little blame if they
simply said that they never dealt directly with
beggars, because in modern urban civilization
it is impossible to deal directly with beggars ;
or if not impossible, at least very difficult. But
these people do not refuse money to beggars on
the ground that such charity is difficult. They
refuse it on the grossly hypocritical ground
that such charity is easy. They say, with the
most grotesque gravity, "Anyone can put his
hand in his pocket and give a poor man a
penny ; but we, we philanthropists, go home and
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SCHOOL FOR HYPOCRITES

brood and travail over the poor man's troubles
until we have discovered exactly what jail, re-
formatory, workhouse, or lunatic asylum it will
really be best for him to go to." This is all
sheer lying. They do not brood about the man
when they get home, and if they did it would
not alter the original fact that their motive for
discouraging beggars is the perfectly rational
one that beggars are a bother. A man may
easily be forgiven for not doing this or that
incidental act of charity, especially when the
question is as genuinely difficult as is the case
of mendicity. But there is something quite
pestilently Pecksniffian about shrinking from a
hard task on the plea that it is not hard
enough. If any man will really try talking to
the ten beggars who come to his door he will
soon find out whether it is really so much easier
than the labor of writing a check for a hospital.

300

XII

THE STALENESS OF THE NEW
SCHOOLS

FOR this deep and disabling reason therefore,
its cynical and abandoned indifference to the
truth, the English public school does not pro-
vide us with the ideal that we require. We
can only ask its modern critics to remember
that right or wrong the thing can be done;
the factory is working, the wheels are going
around, the gentlemen are being produced, with
their soap, cricket and organized charity all
complete. And in this, as we have said before,
the public school really has an advantage over
all the other educational schemes of our time*
You can pick out a public-school man in any of
the many companies into which they stray, from
a Chinese opium den to a German-Jewish
dinner-party. But I doubt if you could tell
which little match girl had been brought up by
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NEW SCHOOLS

undenominational religion and which by secu-
lar education. The great English aristocracy
which has ruled us since the Reformation is
really, in this sense, a model to the moderns.
It did have an ideal, and therefore it has pro-
duced a reality.

We may repeat here that these pages pro-
pose mainly to show one thing: that progress
ought to be based on principle, while our mod-
ern progress is mostly based on precedent. We
go, not by what may be affirmed in theory, but
by what has been already admitted in practice.
That is why the Jacobites are the last Tories
in history with whom a high-spirited person
can have much sympathy. They wanted a spe-
cific thing; they were ready to go forward for
it, and so they were also ready to go back for
it. But modern Tories have only the dullness
of defending situations that they had not the
excitement of creating. Revolutionists make a
reform, Conservatives only conserve the reform.
They never reform the reform, which is often
yery much wanted. Just as the rivalry of arma-
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NEW SCHOOLS

merits is only a sort of sulky plagiarism, so the
rivalry of parties is only a sort of sulky in-
heritance. Men have votes, so women must
soon have votes; poor children are taught b'y
force, so they must soon b'e fed by force; the
police shut public houses by twelve o'clock, so
soon they must shut them by eleven o'clock;
children stop at school till they are fourteen,
so soon they will stop till they are forty. No
gleam of reason, no momentary return to first
principles, no abstract asking of any obvious
question, can interrupt this mad and monoto-
nous gallop of mere progress by precedent. It
is a good way to prevent real revolution. By
this logic of events, the Radical gets as much
into a rut as the Conservative. We meet one
hoary old lunatic who says his grandfather
told him to .stand by one stile. We meet an-
other hoary old lunatic who says his grand-
father told him only to walk along one lane.
I say we may repeat here this primary part
of the argument, because we have just now
come to the place where it is most startlingly
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NEW SCHOOLS

and strongly shown. The final proof that our
elementary schools have no definite ideal of their
own is the fact that they so openly imitate the
ideals of the public schools. In the elementary
schools we have all the ethical prejudices and
exaggerations of Eton and Harrow carefully;
copied for people to whom they do not even
roughly apply. We have the same wildly dis-
proportionate doctrine of the effect of physical
cleanliness on moral character. Educators and
educational politicians declare, amid warm
cheers, that cleanliness is far more important
than all the squabbles about moral and religious
training. It would really seem that so long as
a little boy washes his hands it does not matter
whether he is washing off his mother's jam or
his brother's gore. We have the same grossly in-
sincere pretense that sport always encourages a
sense of honor, when we know that it often ruins
it. Above all, we have the same great upper-
class assumption that things are done best by
large institutions handling large sums of money
and ordering everybody about ; and that trivial
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NEW SCHOOLS

and impulsive charity is in some way contemp-
tible. As Mr. Blatchford says, "The world
does not want piety, but soap — and Socialism."
Piety is one of the popular virtues, whereas
soap and Socialism are two hobbies of the upper
middle class.

These " healthy " ideals, as they are called,
which our politicians and schoolmasters have
borrowed from the aristocratic schools and
applied to the democratic, are by no means
particularly appropriate to an impoverished
democracy. A vague admiration for organized
government and a vague distrust of individual
aid cannot be made to fit in at all into the lives
of people among whom kindness means lending
a saucepan and honor means keeping out of
the workhouse. It resolves itself either into
discouraging that system of prompt and patch-
work generosity which is a daily glory of the
poor, or else into hazy advice to people who
have no money not to give it recklessly away.
Nor is the exaggerated glory of athletics, de-
fensible enough in dealing with the rich who,
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NEW SCHOOLS

if they did not romp and race, would eat and
drink unwholesomely, by any means so much to
the point when applied to people, most of whom
will take a great deal of exercise anyhow, with
spade or hammer, pickax or saw. And for the
third case, of washing, it is obvious that the
same sort of rhetoric about corporeal dainti-
ness which is proper to an ornamental class
cannot, merely as it stands, be applicable to a
dustman. A gentleman is expected to be sub-
stantially spotless all the time. But it is no
more discreditable for a scavenger to be dirty
than for a deep-sea diver to be wet. 'A sweep
is no more disgraced when he is covered with
soot than Michael Angelo when he is covered
with clay, or Bayard when he is covered with
blood. Nor have these extenders of the public-
school tradition done or suggested anything by
way of a substitute for the present snobbish
system which makes cleanliness almost impos-
sible to the poor; I mean the general ritual of
linen and the wearing of the cast-off clothes of
the rich. One man moves into another man's
306

NEW SCHOOLS

clothes as he moves into another man's house.
No wonder that our educationists are not hor-
rified at a man picking up the aristocrat's
second-hand trousers, when they themselves
have only taken up the aristocrat's second-
hand ideas.

XIII

THE OUTLAWED PARENT

THERE is one thing at least of which there is
never so much as a whisper inside the popular
schools ; and that is the opinion of the people.
The only persons who seem to have nothing to
do with the education of the children are the
parents. Yet the English poor have very definite
traditions in many ways. They are hidden
under embarrassment and irony ; and those psy-
chologists who have disentangled them talk of
them as very strange, barbaric and secretive
things. But, as a matter of fact, the traditions
of the poor are mostly simply the traditions of
humanity, a thing which many of us have not
seen for some time. For instance, workingmen
havo a tradition that if one is talking about a
vile thing it is better to talk of it in coarse
language; one is the less likely to be seduced
into excusing it. But mankind had this tradi-
308

THE OUTLAWED PARENT

tion also, until the Puritans and their children,
the Ibsenites, started the opposite idea, that it
does not matter what you say so long as you
say it with long words and a long face. Or
again, the educated classes have tabooed most
jesting about personal appearance; but in do-
ing this they taboo not only the humor of the
slums, but more than half the healthy liter-
ature of the world ; they put polite nose-bags on
the noses of Punch and Bardolph, Stiggins and
Cyrano de Bergerac. Again, the educated
classes have adopted a hideous and heathen cus-
tom of considering death as too dreadful to talk
about, and letting it remain a secret for each
person, like some private malformation. The
poor, on the contrary, make a great gossip and
display about bereavement ; and they are right.
They have hold of a truth of psychology which
is at the back of all the funeral customs of the
children of men. The way to lessen sorrow is
to make a lot of it. The way to endure a pain-
ful crisis is to insist very much that it is a
crisis; to permit people who must feel sad at
309

THE OUTLAWED PARENT

least to feel important. In this the poor are
simply the priests of the universal civilization ;
and in their stuffy feasts and solemn chattering
there is the smell of the baked meats of Hamlet
and the dust and echo of the funeral games of
Patroclus.

The things philanthropists barely excuse (or
do not excuse) in the life of the laboring classes
are simply the things we have to excuse in all
the greatest monuments of man. It may be
that the laborer is as gross as Shakespeare or
as garrulous as Homer ; that if he is religious
he talks nearly as much about hell as Dante;
that if he is worldly he talks nearly as much
about drink as Dickens. Nor is the poor man
without historic support if he thinks less of
that ceremonial washing which Christ dismissed,'
and rather more of that ceremonial drinking
which Christ specially sanctified. The only
difference between the poor man of to-day and
the saints and heroes of history is that which
in all classes separates the common man who
can feel things from the great man who can
310

THE OUTLAWED PARENT

express them. What he feels is merely the her-
itage of man. Now nobody expects of course
that the cabmen and coal-heavers can be com-
plete instructors of their children any more
than the squires and colonels and tea merchants
are complete instructors of their children.
There must be an educational specialist in loco
parentis. But the master at Harrow is in loco
parentls; the master in Hoxton is rather contra
parentum. The vague politics of the squire,
the vaguer virtues of the colonel, the soul and
spiritual yearnings of a tea merchant, are, in
veritable practice, conveyed to the children of
these people at the English public schools. But
I wish here to ask a very plain and emphatic
question. Can anyone alive even pretend to
point out any way in which these special vir-
tues and traditions of the poor are reproduced
in the education of the poor? I do not wish
the costers' irony to appear as coarsely in the
school as it does in the taproom ; but does it
appear at all? Is the child taught to sympa-
thize at all with his father's admirable cheer-
311

THE OUTLAWED PARENT

fulness and slang? I do not expect the pa-
thetic, eager pletas of the mother, with her fu-
neral clothes and funeral baked meats, to be
exactly imitated in the educational system ; but
has it any influence at all on the educational
system? Does any elementary schoolmaster ac-
cord it even an instant's consideration or re-
spect? I do not expect the schoolmaster to
hate hospitals and C.O.S. centers so much as
the schoolboy's father; but does he hate them
at all? Does he sympathize in the least with
the poor man's point of honor against official
institutions? Is it not quite certain that the
ordinary elementary schoolmaster will think it
not merely natural but simply conscientious to
eradicate all these rugged legends of a labori-
ous people, and on principle to preach soap and
Socialism against beer and liberty? In the
lower classes the schoolmaster does not work
for the parent, but against the parent. Modern
education means handing down the customs of
the minority, and rooting out the customs of
the majority. Instead of their Christlike char-

THE OUTLAWED PARENT

ity, their Shakespearean laughter and their
high Homeric reverence for the dead, the poor
have imposed on them mere pedantic copies of
the prejudices of the remote rich. They must
think a bathroom a necessity because to the
lucky it is a luxury ; they must swing Swedish
clubs because their masters are afraid of Eng-
lish cudgels ; and they must get over their prej-
udice against being fed by the parish, because
aristocrats feel no shame about being fed by
the nation.

313

XIV

FOLLY AND FEMALE EDUCATION

IT is the same in the case of girls. I am often
solemnly asked what I think of the new ideas
about female education. But there are no new
ideas about female education. There is not,
there never has been, even the vestige of a new
idea. All the educational reformers did was to
ask what was being done to boys and then go
and do it to girls; just as they asked what was
being taught to young squires and then taught
it to young chimney-sweeps. What they call
new ideas are very old ideas in the wrong place.
Boys play football, why shouldn't girls play
football ; boys have school-colors, why shouldn't
girls have school-colors ; boys go in hundreds
to day-schools, why shouldn't girls go in hun-
dreds to day-schools; boys go to Oxford, why
shouldn't girls go to Oxford — in short, boys
grow mustaches, why shouldn't girls grow mus-
314

FEMALE EDUCATION

taches — that is about their notion of a new
idea. There is no brain-work in the thing at
all; no root query of what sex is, of whether
it alters this or that, and why, any more than
there is any imaginative grip of the humor and
heart of the populace in the popular education.
There is nothing but plodding, elaborate, ele-
phantine imitation. And just as in the case of
elementary teaching, the cases are of a cold and
reckless inappropriateness. Even a savage
could see that bodily things, at least, which are
good for a man are very likely to be bad for a
woman. Yet there is no boy's game, however
brutal, which these mild lunatics have not pro-
moted among girls. To take a stronger case,
they give girls very heavy home-work; never
reflecting that all girls have home-work already
in their homes. It is all a part of the same silly
subjugation; there must be a hard stick-up
collar round the neck of a woman, because it is
already a nuisance round the neck of a man.
Though a Saxon, serf if he wore that collar of
cardboard, would ask for his collar of brass.
315

FEMALE EDUCATION

It will then be answered, not without a sneer,
'* And what would you prefer? Would you go
back to the elegant early Victorian female, with
ringlets and smelling-bottle, doing a little in
water-colors, dabbling a little in Italian, play-
ing a little on the harp, writing in vulgar al-
bums and painting on senseless screens? Do
you prefer that? " To which I answer, " Em-
phatically, yes." I solidly prefer it to the new
female education, for this reason, that I can
see in it an intellectual design, while there is
none in the other. I am by no means sure that
even in point of practical fact that elegant
female would not have been more than a match
for most of the inelegant females. I fancy Jane
Austen was stronger, sharper and shrewder
than Charlotte Bronte; I am quite certain she
was stronger, sharper and shrewder than
George Eliot. She could do one thing neither
of them could do : she could coolly and sensibly
describe a man. I am not sure that the old
great lady who could only smatter Italian was
not more vigorous than the new great lady who
316

FEMALE EDUCATION

can only stammer American; nor am I certain
that the bygone duchesses who were scarcely
successful when they painted Melrose Abbey,
were so much more weak-minded than the mod-
ern duchesses who paint only their own faces,
and are bad at that. But that is not the point.
What was the theory, what was the idea, in
their old, weak water-colors and their shaky
Italian? The idea was the same which in a
ruder rank expressed itself in home-made wines
and hereditary recipes; and which still, in a
thousand unexpected ways, can be found cling-
ing to the women of the poor. It was the idea
I urged in the second part of this book: that
the world must keep one great amateur, lest we
all become artists and perish. Somebody must
renounce all specialist conquests, that she may
conquer all the conquerors. That she may be
a queen of life, she must not be a private sol-
dier in it. I do not think the elegant female
with her bad Italian was a perfect product, any
more than I think the slum woman talking gin
and funerals is a perfect product ; alas ! there
317

FEMALE EDUCATION

are few perfect products. But they come from
a comprehensible idea; and the new woman
comes from nothing and nowhere. It is right
to have an ideal, it is right to have the right
ideal, and these two have the right ideal. The
slum mother with her funerals is the degenerate
daughter of Antigone, the obstinate priestess
of the household gods. The lady talking bad
Italian was the decayed tenth cousin of Portia,
the great and golden Italian lady, the Renas-
cence amateur of life, who could be a barrister
because she could be anything. Sunken and
neglected in the sea of modern monotony and
imitation, the types hold tightly to their orig-
inal truths. Antigone, ugly, dirty and often
drunken, will still bury her father. The elegant
female, vapid and fading away to nothing, still
feels faintly the fundamental difference between
herself and her husband : that he must be Some-
thing in the City, that she may be everything
in the country.

There was a time when you and I and all of
us were all very close to God; so that even
318

FEMALE EDUCATION

now the color of a pebble (or a paint), the
smell of a flower (or a firework), comes to our
hearts with a kind of authority and certainty;
as if they were fragments of a muddled mes-
sage, or features of a forgotten face. To pour
that fiery simplicity upon the whole of life is
the only real aim of education; and closest to
the child comes the woman — she understands.
To say what she understands is beyond me;
save only this, that it is not a solemnity.
Rather it is a towering levity, an uproarious
amateurishness of the universe, such as we felt
when we were little, and would as soon sing
as garden, as soon paint as run. To smatter
the tongues of men and angels, to dabble in
the dreadful sciences, to juggle with pillars
and pyramids and toss up the planets like balls,
this is that inner audacity and indifference
which the human soul, like a conjurer catching
oranges, must keep up forever. This is that
insanely frivolous thing we call sanity. And
the elegant female, drooping her ringlets over
her water-colors, knew it and acted on it. She
319

FEMALE EDUCATION

was juggling with frantic and flaming suns.
She was maintaining the bold equilibrium of
inferiorities which is the most mysterious of
superiorities and perhaps the most unattain-
able. She was maintaining the prime truth of
woman, the universal mother: that if a thing
is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.

320

PART V
THE HOME OF MAN

THE EMPIRE OF THE INSECT

[A CULTIVATED Conservative friend of mine once
exhibited great distress because in a gay mo-
ment I once called Edmund Burke an atheist.
I need scarcely say that the remark lacked
something of biographical precision; it was
meant to. Burke was certainly not an atheist
in his conscious cosmic theory, though he had
not a special and flaming faith in God, like
Robespierre. Nevertheless, the remark had
reference to a truth which it is here relevant to
repeat. I mean that in the quarrel over the
French Revolution, Burke did stand for the
atheistic attitude and mode of argument, as
Robespierre stood for the theistic. The Revo-
lution appealed to the idea of an abstract and
eternal justice, beyond all local custom or con-
venience. If there are commands of God, then
there must be rights of man. Here Burke made
323

EMPIRE' OF THE INSECT

his brilliant diversion ; he did not attack the
Robespierre doctrine with the old mediaeval
doctrine of jus divinum (which, like the Robes-
pierre doctrine, was theistic), he attacked it
with the modern argument of scientific rela-
tivity ; in short, the argument of evolution.
He suggested that humanity was everywhere
molded by or fitted to its environment and in-
stitutions ; in fact, that each people practically
got, not only the tyrant it deserved, but the
tyrant it ought to have. " I know nothing of
the rights of men," he said, " but I know some-
thing of the rights of Englishmen." There
you have the essential atheist. His argument
is that we have got some protection by natural
accident and growth; and why should we pro-
fess to think beyond it, for all the world as if
we were the images of God ! We are born under
a House of Lords, as birds under a house of
leaves; we live under a monarchy as niggers
live under a tropic sun; it is not their fault
if they are slaves, and it is not ours if we are
snobs. Thus, long before Darwin struck his
324

EMPIRE OF THE INSECT

great blow at democracy, the essential of the
Darwinian argument had been already urged
against the French Revolution. Man, said
Burke in effect, must adapt himself to every-
thing, like an animal ; he must not try to alter
everything, like an angel. The last weak cry
of the pious, pretty, half-artificial optimism and
deism of the eighteenth century came in the
voice of Sterne, saying, " God tempers the wind
to the shorn lamb." And Burke, the iron evo-
lutionist, essentially answered, " No ; God tem-
pers the shorn lamb to the wind." It is the
lamb that has to adapt himself. That is, he
either dies or becomes a particular kind of lamb
who likes standing in a draught.

The subconscious popular instinct against
Darwinism was not a mere offense at the gro-
tesque notion of visiting one's grandfather in
a cage in the Regent's Park. Men go in for
drink, practical jokes and many other gro-
tesque things ; they do not much mind making
beasts of themselves, and would not much mind
having beasts made of their forefathers. The
325

EMPIRE OF THE INSECT

real instinct was much deeper and much more
valuable. It was this: that when once one
begins to think of man as a shifting and alter-
able thing, it is always easy for the strong
and crafty to twist him into new shapes for all
kinds of unnatural purposes. The popular in-
stinct sees in such developments the possibility
of backs bowed and hunch-backed for their bur-
den, or limbs twisted for their task. It has a
very well-grounded guess that whatever is done
swiftly and systematically will mostly be done
by a successful class and almost solely in their
interests. It has therefore a vision of inhuman
hybrids and half-human experiments much in
the style of Mr. Wells's " Island of Dr. Mo-
reau." The rich man may come to breeding a
tribe of dwarfs to be his jockeys, and a tribe
of giants to be his hall-porters. Grooms might
be born bow-legged and tailors born cross-
legged ; perfumers might have long, large noses
and a crouching attitude, like hounds of scent;
and professional wine-tasters might have the
horrible expression of one tasting wine stamped
326 •

EMPIRE OF THE INSECT

upon their faces as infants. Whatever wild
image one employs it cannot keep pace with
the panic of the human fancy, when once it
supposes that the fixed type called man could
be changed. If some millionaire wanted arms,
some porter must grow ten arms like an octo-
pus ; if he wants legs, some messenger-boy must
go with a hundred trotting legs like a centi-
pede. In the distorted mirror of hypothesis,
that is, of the unknown, men can dimly see
such monstrous and evil shapes ; men run all to
eye, or all to fingers, with nothing left but one
nostril or one ear. That is the nightmare with
which the mere notion of adaptation threatens
us. That is the nightmare that is not so very
far from the reality.

It will be said that not the wildest evolution-
ist really asks that we should become in any
way unhuman or copy any other animal. Par-
don me, that is exactly what not merely the wild-
est evolutionists urge, but some of the tamest
evolutionists, too. There has risen high in recent
history an important cultus which bids fair to
827,

EMPIRE OF THE INSECT

be the religion of the future — which means the
religion of those few weak-minded people who
live in the future. It is typical of our time that
it has to look for its god through a microscope ;
and our time has marked a definite adoration of
the insect. Like most things we call new, of
course, it is not at all new as an idea; it is
only new as an idolatry. Virgil takes bees se-
riously, but I doubt if he would have kept bees
as carefully as he wrote about them. The wise
king told the sluggard to watch the ant, a
charming occupation — for a sluggard. But in
our own time has appeared a very different
tone, and more than one great man, as well as
numberless intelligent men, have in our time
seriously suggested that we should study the in-
sect because we are his inferiors. The old mor-
alists merely took the virtues of man and dis-
tributed them quite decoratively and arbitrarily
among the animals. The ant was an almost
heraldic symbol of industry, as the lion was of
courage, or, for the matter of that, the pelican
of charity. But if the mediaevals had been con-
328

EMPIRE OF THE INSECT

vinced that a lion was not courageous, they
would have dropped the lion and kept the cour-
age ; if the pelican is not charitable, they would
say, so much the worse for the pelican. The
old moralists, I say, permitted the ant to en-
force and typify man's morality ; they never;
allowed the ant to upset it. They used the ant
for industry as the lark for punctuality ; they
looked up at the flapping birds and down at
the crawling insects for a homely lesson. But
we have lived to see a sect that does not look
down at the insects, but looks up at the insects ;
that asks us essentially to bow down and wor-
ship beetles, like the ancient Egyptians.

Maurice Maeterlinck is a man of unmistak-
able genius, and genius always carries a mag-
nifying glass. In the terrible crystal of his
lens we have seen the bees not as a little yellow
swarm, but rather in golden armies and hier-
archies of warriors and queens. Imagination
perpetually peers and creeps further down the
avenues and vistas in the tubes of science, and
one fancies every frantic reversal of proper-
329

EMPIRE OF THE INSECT

tions; the earwig striding across the echoing
plain like an elephant, or the grasshopper com-
ing roaring above our roofs like a vast aero-
plane, as he leaps from Hertfordshire to Sur-
rey. One seems to enter in a dream a temple
of enormous entomology, whose architecture is
based on something wilder than arms or back-
bones; in which the ribbed columns have the
half-crawling look of dim and monstrous cater-
pillars ; or the dome is a starry spider hung
horribly in the void. There is one of the mod-
ern works of engineering that gives one some-
thing of this nameless fear of the exaggera-
tions of an underworld ; and that is the curious
curved architecture of the underground railway,
commonly called the Twopenny Tube. Those
squat archways, without any upright line or
pillar, look as if they had been tunneled by
huge worms who have never learned to lift their
heads. It is the very underground palace of
the Serpent, the spirit of changing shape and
color, that is the enemy of man.

sso

EMPIRE OF THE INSECT

But it is not merely by such strange aesthetic
suggestions that writers like Maeterlinck have
influenced us in the matter; there is also an
ethical side to the business. The upshot of
M. Maeterlinck's book on bees is an admiration,
one might also say an envy, of their collective
spirituality; of the fact that they live only
for something which he calls the Soul of the
Hive. And this admiration for the communal
morality of insects is expressed in many other
modern writers in various quarters and shapes ;
in Mr. Benjamin Kidd's theory of living only
for the evolutionary future of our race, and in
the great interest of some Socialists in ants,
which they generally prefer to bees, I suppose,
because they are not so brightly colored. Not
least among the hundred evidences of this vague
insectolatry are the floods of flattery poured by
modern people on that energetic nation of the
Far East of which it has been said that " Pa-
triotism is its only religion"; or, in other
words, that it lives only for the Soul of the
831

EMPIRE OF THE INSECT

Hive. When at long intervals of the centuries
Christendom grows weak, morbid or skeptical,
and mysterious Asia begins to move against us
her dim populations and to pour them westward
like a dark movement of matter, in such cases
it has been very common to compare the inva-
sion to a plague of lice or incessant armies of
locusts. The Eastern armies were indeed like
insects; in their blind, busy destructiveness, in
their black nihilism of personal outlook, in their
hateful indifference to individual life and love,
in their base belief in mere numbers, in their
pessimistic courage and their atheistic patriot-
ism, the riders and raiders of the East are in-
deed like all the creeping things of the earth.
But never before, I think, have Christians called
a Turk a locust and meant it as a compliment.
Now for the first time we worship as well as
fear; and trace with adoration that enormous
form advancing vast and vague out of Asia,
faintly discernible amid the mystic clouds of
winged creatures hung over the wasted lands,
thronging the skies like thunder and discolor-
332

EMPIRE OF THE INSECT

ing the skies like rain ; Beelzebub, the Lord of
Flies.

In resisting this horrible theory of the Soul
of the Hive, we of Christendom stand not for
ourselves, but for all humanity; for the essen-
tial and distinctive human idea that one good
and happy man is an end in himself, that a soul
is worth saving. Nay, for those who like such
biological fancies it might well be said that we
stand as chiefs and champions of a whole sec-
tion of nature, princes of the house whose cog-
nizance is the backbone, standing for the milk
of the individual mother and the courage of
the wandering cub, representing the pathetic
chivalry of the dog, the humor and perversity
of cats, the affection of the tranquil horse, the
loneliness of the lion. It is more to the point,
however, to urge that this mere glorification of
society as it is in the social insects is a trans-
formation and a dissolution in one of the out-
lines which have been specially the symbols of
man. In the cloud and confusion of the flies
and bees is growing fainter and fainter, as if
333

EMPIRE OF THE INSECT

finally disappearing, the idea of the human
family. The hive has become larger than the
house, the bees are destroying their captors ;
what the locust hath left, the caterpillar hath
eaten ; and the little house and garden of our
friend Jones is in a bad way.

334

n

THE FALLACY OF THE UMBRELLA
STAND

WHEN Lord Morley said that the House of
Lords must be either mended or ended, he used
a phrase which has caused some confusion ; be-
cause it might seem to suggest that mending
and ending are somewhat similar things. I
wish specially to insist on the fact that mend-
ing and ending are opposite things. You mend
a thing because you like it; you end a thing
because you don't. To mend is to strengthen.
I, for instance, disbelieve in oligarchy; so I
would no more mend the House of Lords than
I would mend a thumbscrew. On the other
hand, I do believe in the family; therefore I
would mend the family as I would mend a chair ;
and I will never deny for a moment that the
modern family is a chair that wants mending.
But here comes in the essential point about the
335

THE UMBRELLA STAND

mass of modern advanced sociologists. Here
are two institutions that have always been fun-
damental with mankind, the family and the
state. Anarchists, I believe, disbelieve in both.
It is quite unfair to say that Socialists believe
in the state, but do not believe in the family ;
thousands of Socialists believe more in the fam-
ily than any Tory. But it is true to say that
while anarchists would end both, Socialists are
specially engaged in mending (that is, strength-
ening and renewing) the state; and they are
not specially engaged in strengthening and re-
newing the family. They are not doing any-
thing to define the functions of father, mother,
and child, as such ; they are not tightening the
machine up again ; they are not blackening in
again the fading lines of the old drawing. With
the state they are doing this; they are sharp-
ening its machinery, they are blacking in its
black dogmatic lines, they are making mere
government in every way stronger and in some
ways harsher than before. While they leave
the home in ruins, they restore the hive, espe-
336

THE UMBRELLA STAND

cially the stings. Indeed, some schemes of
labor and Poor Law reform recently advanced
by distinguished Socialists, amount to little
more than putting the largest number of peo-
ple in the despotic power of Mr. Bumble. Ap-
parently, progress means being moved on — by
the police.

The point it is my purpose to urge might
perhaps be suggested thus : that Socialists and
most social reformers of their color are vividly
conscious of the line between the kind of things
that belong to the state and the kind of things
that belong to mere chaos or uncoercible na-
ture; they may force children to go to school
before the sun rises, but they will not try to
force the sun to rise ; they will not, like Canute,
banish the sea, but only the sea-bathers. But
inside the outline of the state their lines are
confused, and entities melt into each other.
They have no firm instinctive sense of one thing
being in its nature private and another public,
of one thing being necessarily bond and an-
other free. That is why piece by piece, and

THE UMBRELLA STAND

quite silently, personal liberty is being stolen
from Englishmen, as personal land has been
silently stolen ever since the sixteenth century.
I can only put it sufficiently curtly in a care-
less simile. A Socialist means a man who thinks
a walking-stick like an umbrella because they
both go into the umbrella-stand. Yet they are
as different as a battle-ax and a bootjack. The
essential idea of an umbrella is breadth and
protection. The essential idea of a stick is
slenderness and, partly, attack. The stick is
the sword, the umbrella is the shield, but it is
a shield against another and more nameless
enemy — the hostile but anonymous universe.
More properly, therefore, the umbrella is the
roof; it is a kind of collapsible house. But the
vital difference goes far deeper than this ; it
branches off into two kingdoms of man's mind,
with a chasm between. For the point is this:
that the umbrella is a shield against an enemy
so actual as to be a mere nuisance ; whereas the
stick is a sword against enemies so entirely im-
aginary as to be a pure pleasure. The stick is
338

THE UMBRELLA STAND

not merely a sword, but a court sword; it is
a thing of purely ceremonial swagger. One
cannot express the emotion in any way except
by saying that a man feels more like a man
with a stick in his hand, just as he feels more
like a man with a sword at his side. But no-
body ever had any swelling sentiments about an
umbrella; it is a convenience, like a door-
scraper. An umbrella is a necessary evil. A
walking-stick is a quite unnecessary good.
This, I fancy, is the real explanation of the
perpetual losing of umbrellas; one does not
hear of people losing walking-sticks. For a
walking-stick is a pleasure, a piece of real per-
sonal property; it is missed even when it is not
needed. When my right hand forgets its stick
may it forget its cunning. But anybody may
forget an umbrella, as anybody might forget a
shed that he had stood up in out of the rain.
Anybody can forget a necessary thing.

If I might pursue the figure of speech, I might
briefly say that the whole Collectivist error
consists in saying that because two men can
339

THE UMBRELLA STAND

share an umbrella, therefore two men can share
a walking-stick. Umbrellas might possibly be
replaced by some kind of common awnings cov-
ering certain streets from particular showers.
But there is nothing but nonsense in the notion
of swinging a communal stick; it is as if one
spoke of twirling a communal mustache. It
will be said that this is a frank fantasia and
that no sociologists suggest such follies. Par-
don me, they do. I will give a precise parallel
to the case of the confusion of sticks and um-
brellas, a parallel from a perpetually reiterated
suggestion of reform. At least sixty Socialists
out of a hundred, when they have spoken of
common laundries, will go on at once to speak
of common kitchens. This is just as mechanical
and unintelligent as the fanciful case I have
quoted. Sticks and umbrellas are both stiff
rods that go into holes in a stand in the hall.
Kitchens and washouses are both large rooms
full of heat and damp and steam. But the soul
and function of the two things are utterly oppo-
site. There is only one way of washing a shirt ;
340

THE UMBRELLA STAND

that is, there is only one right way. There is
no taste and fancy in tattered shirts. Nobody
says, " Tompkins likes five holes in his shirt,
but I must say, give me the good old four
holes." Nobody says, " This washerwoman rips
up the left leg of my pyjamas ; now if there is
one thing I insist on it is the right leg ripped
up." The ideal washing is simply to send a
thing back washed. But it is by no means true
that the ideal cooking is simply to send a thing
back cooked. Cooking is an art ; it has in it per-
sonality, and even perversity, for the definition
of an art is that which must be personal and
may be perverse. I know a man, not otherwise
dainty, who cannot touch common sausages un-
less they are almost burned to a coal. He wants
his sausages fried to rags, yet he does not in-
sist on his shirts being boiled to rags. I do
not say that such points of culinary delicacy
are of high importance. I do not say that the
communal ideal must give way to them. What
I say is that the communal ideal is not con-
scious of their existence, and therefore goes

THE UMBRELLA STAND

wrong from the very start, mixing a wholly
public thing with a highly individual one. Per-
haps we ought to accept communal kitchens in
the social crisis, just as we should accept com-
munal cat's-meat in a siege. But the cultured
Socialist, quite at his ease, by no means in a
siege, talks about communal kitchens as if they
were the same kind of thing as communal laun-
dries. This shows at the start that he misun-
derstands human nature. It is as different as
three men singing the same chorus from three
men playing three tunes on the same piano.

343

in

THE DREADFUL DUTY OF GUDGE

IN the quarrel earlier alluded to between the
energetic Progressive and the obstinate Conser-
vative (or, to talk a tenderer language, between
Hudge and Gudge), the state of cross-purposes
is at the present moment acute. The Tory says
he wants to preserve family life in Cindertown ;
the Socialist very reasonably points out to him
that in Cindertown at present there isn't any
family life to preserve. But Hudge, the So-
cialist, in his turn, is highly vague and myste-
rious about whether he would preserve the fam-
ily life if there were any ; or whether he will try
to restore it where it has disappeared. It is all
very confusing. The Tory sometimes talks as
if he wanted to tighten the domestic bonds that
do not exist; the Socialist as if he wanted to
loosen the bonds that do not bind anybody.
The question we all want to ask of both of

DUTY OF GUDGE

them is the original ideal question, " Do you
want to keep the family at all? " If Hudge,
the Socialist, does want the family he must be
prepared for the natural restraints, distinctions
and divisions of labor in the family. He must
brace himself up to bear the idea of the woman
having a preference for the private house and a
man for the public house. He must manage
to endure somehow the idea of a woman being
womanly, which does not mean soft and yield-
ing, but handy, thrifty, rather hard, and very
humorous. He must confront without a quiver
the notion of a child who shall be childish, that
is, full of energy, but without an idea of inde-
pendence; fundamentally as eager for author-
ity as for information and butter-scotch. If a
man, a woman and a child live together any
more in free and sovereign households, these
ancient relations will recur; and Hudge must
put up with it. He can only avoid it by de-
stroying the family, driving both sexes into
sexless hives and hordes, and bringing up all
children as the children of the state — like Oliver

DUTY OF GUDGE

Twist. But if these stern words must be ad-
dressed to Hudge, neither shall Gudge escape a
somewhat severe admonition. For the plain
truth to be told pretty sharply to the Tory
is this, that if he wants the family to remain,
if he wants to be strong enough to resist the
rending forces of our essentially savage com-
merce, he must make some very big sacrifices
and try to equalize property. The overwhelm-
ing mass of the English people at this partic-
ular instant are simply too poor to be domestic.
They are as domestic as they can manage ;
they are much more domestic than the govern-
ing class ; but they cannot get what good there
was originally meant to be in this institution,
simply because they have not got enough
money. The man ought to stand for a cer-
tain magnanimity, quite lawfully expressed in
throwing money away ; but if under given cir-
cumstances he can only do it by throwing the
week's food away, then he is not magnanimous,
but mean. The woman ought to stand for a
certain wisdom which is well expressed in Talu-
s'

DUTY OF GUDGE

ing things rightly and guarding money sensi-
bly; but how is she to guard money if there is
no money to guard? The child ought to look
on his mother as a fountain of natural fun and
poetry; but how can he unless the fountain,
like other fountains, is allowed to play? What
chance have any of these ancient arts and func-
tions in a house so hideously topsy-turvy; a
house where the woman is out working and the
man isn't ; and the child is forced by law to
think his schoolmaster's requirements more im-
portant than his mother's? No, Gudge and
his friends in the House of Lords and the Carl-
ton Club must make up their minds on this
matter, and that very quickly. If they are
content to have England turned into a beehive
and an ant-hill, decorated here and there with
a few faded butterflies playing at an old game
called domesticity in the intervals of the divorce
court, then let them have their empire of in-
sects; they will find plenty of Socialists who
will give it to them. But if they want a do-
mestic England, they must " shell out," as the
346

DUTY OF GUDGE

phrase goes, to a vastly greater extent than
any Radical politician has yet dared to sug-
gest; they must endure burdens much heavier
than the Budget and strokes much deadlier than
the death duties; for the thing to be done is
nothing more nor less than the distribution of
the great fortunes and the great estates. We
can now only avoid Socialism by a change as
vast as Socialism. If we are to save property
we must distribute property, almost as sternly
and sweepingly as did the French Revolution.
If we are to preserve the family we must revo-
lutionize the nation.

347,

IV

A LAST INSTANCE

AND now, as this book Is drawing to a close, I
will whisper in the reader's ear a horrible suspi-
cion that has sometimes haunted me: the suspi-
cion that Hudge and Gudge are secretly in part-
nership. That the quarrel they keep up in
public is very much of a put-up job, and that
the way in which they perpetually play into
each other's hands is not an everlasting coin-
cidence. Gudge, the plutocrat, wants an an-
archic industrialism; Hudge, the idealist, pro-
vides him with lyric praises of anarchy. Gudge
wants women-workers because they are cheaper ;
Hudge calls the woman's work " freedom to live
her own life." Gudge wants steady and obedi-
ent workmen ; Hudge preaches teetotalism — to
workmen, not to Gudge. Gudge wants a tame
and timid population who will never take arms
against tyranny; Hudge proves from Tolstoi
348

A LAST INSTANCE

that nobody must take arms against anything.
Gudge is naturally a healthy and well-washed
gentleman; Hudge earnestly preaches the per-
fection of Gudge's washing to people who can't
practice it. Above all, Gudge rules by a coarse
and cruel system of sacking and sweating and
bi-sexual toil which is totally inconsistent with
the free family and which is bound to destroy
it ; therefore Hudge, stretching out his arms to
the universe with a prophetic smile, tells us that
the family is something that we shall soon
gloriously outgrow.

I do not know whether the partnership of
Hudge and Gudge is conscious or unconscious.
I only know that between them they still keep
the common man homeless. I only know I still
meet Jones walking the streets in the gray twi-
light, looking sadly at the poles and barriers
and low red goblin lanterns which still guard the
house which is none the less his because he has
never been in it.

349

CONCLUSION

HEBE, it may be said, my book ends just where
it ought to begin. I have said that the strong
centers of modern English property must swiftly
or slowly be broken up, if even the idea of prop-
erty is to remain among Englishmen. There
are two ways in which it could be done, a cold
administration by quite detached officials, which
is called Collectivism, or a personal distribution,
so as to produce what is called Pleasant Pro-
prietorship. I think the latter solution the finer
and more fully human, because it makes each
man as somebody blamed somebody for saying
of the Pope, a sort of small god. A man on
his own turf tastes eternity or, in other words,
will give ten minutes more work than is required.
But I believe I am justified in shutting the door
on this vista of argument, instead of opening it.
For this book is not designed to prove the case
850

CONCLUSION

for Pleasant Proprietorship, but to prove the
case against modern sages who turn reform to
a routine. The whole of this book has been a
rambling and elaborate urging of one purely
ethical fact. And if by any chance it should
happen that there are still some who do not
quite see what that point is, I will end with one
plain parable, which is none the worse for being
also a fact.

A little while ago certain doctors and other
persons permitted by modern law to dictate to
their shabbier fellow-citizens, sent out an order
that all little girls should have their hair cut
short. I mean, of course, all little girls whose
parents were poor. Many very unhealthy habits
are common among rich little girls, but it will
be long before any doctors interfere forcibly
with them. Now, the case for this particular
interference was this, that the poor are pressed
'down from above into such stinking and suffo-
cating underworlds of squalor, that poor people
must not be allowed to have hair, because in
their case it must mean lice in the hair. There-
351

CONCLUSION

fore, the doctors propose to abolish the hair. It
never seems to have occurred to them to abolish
the lice. Yet it could be done. As is common
in most modern discussions the unmentionable
thing is the pivot of the whole discussion. It
is obvious to any Christian man (that is, to any
man with a free soul) that any coercion applied
to a cabman's daughter ought, if possible, to
be applied to a Cabinet Minister's daughter.
I will not ask why the doctors do not, as a
matter of fact, apply their rule to a Cabinet
Minister's daughter. I will not ask, because
I know. They do not because they dare
not. But what is the excuse they would urge,
what is the plausible argument they would use,
for thus cutting and clipping poor children
and not rich? Their argument would be that
the disease is more likely to be in the hair of
poor people than of rich. And why? Because
the poor children are forced (against all the
instincts of the highly domestic working classes)
to crowd together in close rooms under a wildly
inefficient system of public instruction ; and be-
352!

CONCLUSION

cause in one out of the forty children there may
be offense. And why? Because the poor man is
so ground down by the great rents of the great
ground landlords that his wife often has to
work as well as he. Therefore she has no time
to look after the children ; therefore one in forty
of them is dirty. Because the workingman
has these two persons on top of him, the land-
lord sitting (literally) on his stomach, and the
schoolmaster sitting (literally) on his head, the
workingman must allow his little girl's hair,
first to be neglected from poverty, next to be
poisoned by promiscuity, and, lastly, to be abol-
ished by hygiene. He, perhaps, was .proud of
his little girl's hair. But he does not count.

Upon this simple principle (or rather prece-
dent) the sociological doctor drives gayly ahead.
When a crapulous tyranny crushes men down
into the dirt, so that their very hair is dirty, the
scientific course is clear. It would be long and
laborious to cut off the heads of the tyrants ;
it is easier to cut off the hair of the slaves. In
the same way, if it should ever happen that
353

CONCLUSION

poor children, screaming with toothache, dis-
turbed any schoolmaster or artistic gentleman,
it would be easy to pull out all the teeth of the
poor ; if their nails were disgustingly dirty, their
nails could be plucked out ; if their noses were
indecently blown, their noses could be cut off.
The appearance of our humbler fellow-citizen
could be quite strikingly simplified before we
had done with him. But all this is not a bit
wilder than the brute fact that a doctor can
walk into the house of a free man, whose daugh-
ter's hair may be as clean as spring flowers, and
order him to cut it off. It never seems to strike
these people that the lesson of lice in the slums
is the wrongness of slums, not the wrongness of
hair. Hair is, to say the least of it, a rooted
thing. Its enemy (like the other insects and
oriental armies of whom we have spoken) sweep
upon us but seldom. In truth, it is only by eter-
nal institutions like hair that we can test passing
institutions like empires. If a house is so built
as to knock a man's head off when he enters it,
it is built wrong.

354

CONCLUSION

The mob can never rebel unless it is conserva-
tive, at least enough to have conserved some
reasons for rebelling. It is the most awful
thought in all our anarchy, that most of the
ancient blows struck for freedom would not be
struck at all to-day, because of the obscuration
of the clean, popular customs from which they
came. The insult that brought down the ham-
mer of Wat Tyler might now be called a medi-
cal examination. That which Virginius loathed
and avenged as foul slavery might now be
praised as free love. The cruel taunt of Foulon,
*'Let them eat grass," might now be repre-
sented as the dying cry of an idealistic vegetar-
ian. Those great scissors of science that would
snip off the curls of the poor little school chil-
dren are ceaselessly snapping closer and closer
to cut off all the corners and fringes of the arts
and honors of the poor. Soon they will be twist-
ing necks to suit clean collars, and hacking feet
to fit new boots. It never seems to strike them
that the body is more than raiment ; that the
Sabbath was made for man ; that all institutions
355

CONCLUSION

shall be judged and damned by whether they
have fitted the normal flesh and spirit. It is the
test of political sanity to keep your head. It
is the test of artistic sanity to keep your
hair on.

Now the whole parable and purpose of these
last pages, and indeed of all these pages, is this :
to assert that we must instantly begin all over
again, and begin at the other end. I begin with
a little girl's hair. That I know is a good thing
at any rate. Whatever else is evil, the pride of
a good mother in the beauty of her daughter is
good. It is one of those adamantine tender-
nesses which are the touchstones of every age
and race. If other things are against it, other
things must go down. If landlords and laws and
sciences are against it, landlords and laws and
sciences must go down. With the red hair of
one she-urchin in the gutter I will set fire to all
modern civilization. Because a girl should have
long hair, she should have clean hair; because
she should have clean hair, she should not have
an unclean home; because she should not have
356

CONCLUSION

an unclean home, she should have a free and
leisured mother; because she should have a free
mother, she should not have an usurious land-
lord ; because there should not be an usurious
landlord, there should be a redistribution of
property ; because there should be a redistribu-
tion of property, there shall be a revolution.
That little urchin with the gold-red hair, whom
I have just watched toddling past my house,
she shall not be lopped and lamed and altered ;
her hair shall not be cut short like a convict's ;
no, all the kingdoms of the earth shall be hacked
about and mutilated to suit her. She is the
human and sacred image; all around her the
social fabric shall sway and split and fall; the
pillars of society shall be shaken, and the roofs
of ages come rushing down; and not one hair
of her head shall be harmed.

357

THREE NOTES

ON FEMALE SUFFRAGE

NOT wishing to overload this long essay with
too many parentheses, apart from its thesis of
progress and precedent, I append here three
notes on points of detail that may possibly be
misunderstood.

The first refers to the female controversy.
It may seem to many that I dismiss too curtly
the contention that all women should have votes,
even if most women do not desire them. It is
constantly said in this connection that males
have received the vote (the agricultural labor-
ers for instance) when only a minority of them
were in favor of it. Mr. Galsworthy, one of
the few fine fighting intellects of our time, has
talked this language in the "Nation." Now,
broadly, I have only to answer here, as every-
where in this book, that history is not a tobog-
gan slide, but a road to be reconsidered and
even retraced. If we really forced General

361

362 ON FEMALE SUFFRAGE

Elections upon free laborers who definitely dis-
liked General Elections, then it was a thor-
oughly undemocratic thing to do; if we are
democrats we ought to undo it. We want the
will of the people, not the votes of the people;
and to give a man a vote against his will is
to make voting more valuable than the democ-
racy it declares.

But this analogy is false, for a plain and
particular reason. Many voteless women re-
gard a vote as unwomanly. Nobody says that
most voteless men regarded a vote as unmanly.
Nobody says that any voteless men regarded
it as unmanly. Not in the stillest hamlet or
the most stagnant fen could you find a yokel
or a tramp who thought he lost his sexual dig-
nity by being part of a political mob. If he
did not care about a vote it was solely because
he did not know about a vote; he did not un-
derstand the word any better than Bimetallism.
His opposition, if it existed, was merely nega-
tive. His indifference to a vote was really in-
difference.

But the female sentiment against the fran-

ON FEMALE SUFFRAGE 363

chise, whatever its size, is positive. It is not
negative; it is by no means indifferent. Such
women as are opposed to the change regard it
(rightly or wrongly) as unfeminine. That is,
as insulting certain affirmative traditions to
which they are attached. You may think such
a view prejudiced; but I violently deny that
any democrat has a right to override such prej-
udices, if they are popular and positive. Thus
he would not have a right to make millions of
Moslems vote with a cross if they had a preju-
dice in favor of voting with a crescent. Unless
this is admitted, democracy is a farce we need
scarcely keep up. If it is admitted, the Suf-
fragists have not merely to awaken an indif-
ferent, but to convert a hostile majority.

n

ON CLEANLINESS IN EDUCATION

ON re-reading my protest, which I honestly
think much needed, against our heathen idola-
try of mere ablution, I see that it may possibly
be misread. I hasten to say that I think wash-
ing a most important thing to be taught both
to rich and poor. I do not attack the posi-
tive but the relative position of soap. Let it
be insisted on even as much as now; but let
other things be insisted on much more. I am
even ready to admit that cleanliness is next to
godliness ; but the moderns will not even admit
godliness to be next to cleanliness. In their
talk about Thomas Becket and such saints and
heroes they make soap more important than
soul; they reject godliness whenever it is not
cleanliness. If we resent this about remote
saints and heroes, we should resent it more
about the many saints and heroes of the

364

EDUCATION 365

slums, whose unclean hands cleanse the
world. Dirt is evil chiefly as evidence
of sloth; but the fact remains that the
classes that wash most are those that work
least. Concerning these, the practical course
is simple; soap should be urged on them and
advertised as what it is — a luxury. With re-
gard to the poor also the practical course is
not hard to harmonize with our thesis. If we
want to give poor people soap we must set out
deliberately to give them luxuries. If we will
not make them rich enough to be clean, then
emphatically we must do what we did with the
saints. We must reverence them for being
dirty.

in

ON PEASANT PROPRIETORSHIP

I HAVE not dealt with any details touching dis-
tributed ownership, or its possibility in Eng-
land, for the reason stated in the text. This
book deals with what is wrong, wrong in our
root of argument and effort. This wrong is, I
say, that we will go forward because we dare
not go back. Thus the Socialist says that
property is already concentrated into Trusts
and Stores : the only hope is to concentrate it
further in the State. I say the only hope is
to unconcentrate it; that is, to repent and re-
turn ; the only step forward is the step back-
ward.

But in connection with this distribution I
have laid myself open to another potential mis-
take. In speaking of a sweeping redistribu-
tion, I speak of decision in the aim, not neces-
sarily of abruptness in the means. It is not
at all toojate to restore an approximately ra-

366

PROPRIETORSHIP 367

tional state of English possessions without any
mere confiscation. A policy of buying out
landlordism, steadily adopted in England as it
has already been adopted in Ireland (notably
in Mr. Wyndham's wise and fruitful Act),
would in a very short time release the lower
end of the see-saw and make the whole plank
swing more level. The objection to this course
is not at all that it would not do, only that it
will not be done. If we leave things as they
are, there will almost certainly be a crash of
confiscation. If we hesitate, we shall soon have
to hurry. But if we start doing it quickly we
have still time to do it slowly.

This point, however, is not essential to my
book. All I have to urge between these two
boards is that I dislike the big Whiteley shop,
and that I dislike Socialism because it will (ac-
cording to Socialists) be so like that shop. It
is its fulfilment, not its reversal. I do not ob-
ject to Socialism because it will revolutionize
our commerce, but because it will leave it so
horribly the same.

LIBRARY F

A 000030591 2